Raqs Media Collective "The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet"

e-flux

poster for Raqs Media Collective "The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet"

This event has ended.

e-flux is pleased to present an installation by Raqs Media Collective combining historical photographs (from the Galton Collection at University College, London, and the Alkazi Collection, New Delhi) and incorporating video, animation, and sound. Stories leak, histories collide. Bones, bodies, faces, and handwriting blur. Crowds gather and move. Open-ended and anti-documentary, "The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet " builds sequential scenarios that move across time and space, while considering collectivity, anonymity and the question of identity through history, fantasy and speculation.

Presented within a setting suggestive of a lecture hall, there is the anticipation of discourse: chairs and microphones are found on raised platforms yet speakers are absent. The presentation evokes the lecture- performance format commonly employed by the artists, but they, their bodies themselves, have somehow disappeared. Their voices are left behind, along with entire cabinets of curiosities.

"What happens when you layer one time on to another time? Do you get two times at once, or, do you register some other, singular temporal experience, analogous to the mysteriously singular 'composite' portrait of many individuals, which is neither a sum of the parts of the photographs of many faces, nor an average but a 'new' different face, which looks as if it belonged to a unique life. A life never lived, but made manifest as a photographic accident. Can there be a time made of juxtapositions, a time never experienced, but made serendipitously manifest by interpretative accidents? By the careful cultivation of chance encounters in scattered archives." — Raqs on "The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet"

[Image: Raqs Media Collective "The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet" (2009) Installation view]

Media

Schedule

from September 16, 2010 to October 30, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-09-16 from 18:00 to 20:00

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