Press Release
Exhibition Name: Extra Time
Exhibition Date：Aug. 23rd, 2013 – Nov. 17th, 2013
Curators: Chang Tsong-zung (Johnson Chang), Li Zhenhua
Artists: Raqs Media Collective
‘Extra Time‘ opens as the Chronus Art Center‘s inaugural show in Shanghai on the 23rd of August. The show brings together new and recent work by Raqs Media Collective (New Delhi, India) focusing on their investigations of time and temporality in different registers that span the spectrum of their diverse practice ranging from performance , to installation, architectural ensembles, video and photography.
For Raqs, time is more than the subject matter of their work. They treat time as if it were an actual medium, using duration, repetition, echo and the traces of our subjective responses to time’s passage as raw material for the construction of assemblages that seek to deflect the urgencies proposed by capitalism in favour of more considered ways of thinking about the world.
By creating striking constellations of images, by using found and solicited material, quoting and transforming elements of news photography, ubiquitous signage, theatre, architecture and broadcast sports video, Raqs point to their vision of the networked nature of artistic and cultural production in the contemporary world. The works in this show are in several instances distillations of the many ongoing conversations that Raqs maintains and cultivates across disciplines and genres with different kinds of practitioners. These are the embodiments of their dialogues with theatre, with journalistic photography, with architecture, with theory and discourse.
This polyphonic iteration of their thinking process is in keeping with their understanding of our sense of our time and their own practice as being composed of many different elements that need to speak and listen to one another. ‘Extra Time’ may be seen as a result of this conversation, as a thoughtful analytical tool, a poetic device, a theatrical demonstration as well as a sporting entertainment that unpacks and re-composes these elements into a cogent yet whimsical set of statements and gestures about being alive to the demands of being artists in today’s world.
Raqs has been in continuous conversation with West Heavens Project (www.westheavens.net) since 2010. This exhibition is also a result of their residency in Shanghai in April 2012, invited by West Heavens. As the first solo exhibition of the group, series of public events will be unfolded with its opening, along with the book launch of their first book in Chinese Kinetic Contemplation.
Hosted by Chronus Art Center, West Heavens, School of Inter-Media Art of China Academy of Art
Special Thanks to Inter-Asia School, Moonchu Foundation, CP Denmark Aps, WTi Group, Parabola Media Lab
Raqs Media Collective
The Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) are a contemporary art practice based in New Delhi. Their work takes the form of installations, video, photography, image-text collages, on- and off-line media objects, performances and encounters. They cross contemporary and media art practice with historical and philosophical speculation, research and theory. The Raqs collective have exhibited widely, including at Documenta 11, and the Venice, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Taipei and Sydney Biennales. Works by Raqs Media Collective are part of several major contemporary art collections and museums, including the Thyssen-Bornemisza 21 Contemporary Art Collection, Vienna, the Shumita & Arani Bose Collection, New York, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Berger Collection, Moon Chu Collection, Hong Kong and Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon.
In 2007, they curated The Rest of Now in Bolzano/Bozen for the seventh edition of the Manifesta Biennial of Contemporary Art in Europe. In 2000, they co-founded the Sarai initiative (www.sarai.net) at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader Series.
Seepage, a collection of Raqs’ essays and image-text works was published by Sternberg Press, Berlin & New York in 2010. Raqs媒体小组 – 动力沉思 (Raqs Media Collective – Kinetic Contemplations) a collection of essays by and about Raqs has been published (in Chinese) by Beepub Press, Beijing, 2013
Photography historian Gu Zheng, art critic Huang Chien-Hung (Taiwan) and Indian writer Mishi Saran respond to the Extra Time exhibition by giving talks on photo history, crowds and multitudes, as well as Sino-Indian exchange in history during the exhibition period. Please visit Chronus and West Heavens websites for the updated information.
Gu Zheng
Born in 1959, professor of photography at Fudan University in Shanghai and is one of China’s leading scholars of contemporary photography. He has written articles for numerous journals and exhibition catalogues in China and was a chief curator and curatorial committee member of the 2005 Guangzhou Photo Biennial.
Huang Chien-hung
Associate professor of Taipei National University of Arts, in the Institute of Trans-disciplinary Art
Publication : COQ at 2009, An Independent Discourse at 2010, Trans-Plex Agenda at 2011, EMU at 2012.Also as cinema critics, and the critics for the contemporary art and the spectacl.
Translator in Chinese of the books of G. Deleuze, J. Baudrillard and of J. Rancière.
Mishi Saran
Ms. Mishi Saran was born in India and spent the first ten years of her life in New Delhi. Since then, she has lived in Switzerland, Indonesia, the United States, China, Hong Kong and Korea. She moved to Shanghai in 2006. She is the author of the travel book-cum-memoir Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang.(Penguin, 2005). To research the book, she spent a year tracing the footsteps of Xuanzang, a 7th Century Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled along the Silk Road from China to India, passing through Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Her first novel, The Other Side of Light is published by HarperCollins India (June 2012). She is currently working on her third book, also a novel, set in Shanghai in the 1930s.
