Artist Talk: Monica Narula from Raqs Media Collective

6:30pm, Thu 07 Dec 2023

Hear more about their recent commission, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone

This event is part of our Past Programme

In conversation with Eszter Steierhoffer (Director, Jencks Foundation), Raqs Media Collective member Monica Narula discusses their new film commission and exhibition 1980 in Parallax on view at The Cosmic House until 23 December 2023. The conversation will evolve around a particular year, and touch upon perceptions of time and geography, fact and fiction. As part of the event, we will also screen The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone.

Produced in partnership with Jencks Foundation at the Cosmic House

Details on how to access this event will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place.

Biographies

Monica Narula formed Raqs Media Collective in 1992, along with Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, associative milieus and curation. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. Raqs enlists whatever they can find in the world — a 2000-year-old cup, a 300-year-old automata, 150-year-old biscuits, a billion-year-old meteorite — to sniff and taste time. Such and other devices are played with in order to undertake historical subterfuge and fabulist adventures. Raqs is also interested in the way language is material, and how we can feel the sensation of thought.

Eszter Steierhoffer is a London based art historian and curator, she is Director at the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House. Previous to her current role she was Senior Curator at the Design Museum in London and Curator of Contemporary Architecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where she curated a number of thematic exhibitions to situate architecture in its broader cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts. She received her PhD degree from the Royal College of Art, her academic research revolves around the histories and exhibitions of Post-Modern architecture.