Moving Images is a screening programme by AFA, featuring documentary, experimental and essayistic films on questions that animate our present. Each screening opens into a conversation, with an invited artist, scholar, filmmaker or curator in dialogue with the audience.
Qamoos Bukhari presents four video works by Raqs Media Collective at Anant Foundation for the Arts in continuation of Time Is Never Ripe, the collective’s recently concluded show at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation which was curated by him and supported by RMZ Foundation. Never before screened in Delhi, these works follow the quiet life of matter: coal, salt, iron, water and air. They are not documentaries but works to be encountered as experiences.
Image Credits:
The Blood of Stars, 2017
Single screen, Video
Duration, 13 minutes
(B&W filter added by AFA)
Time is Never Ripe
Qamoos Bukhari presents four video works by Raqs Media Collective at Anant Foundation for the Arts in continuation of Time Is Never Ripe, the collective’s recently concluded show at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation which was curated by him and supported by RMZ Foundation. The exhibition marked Raqs’ institutional solo presence in India for over a decade, following Asamayavali / Untimely Calendar at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, in 2014.
Across the series of artists' films: Provisions for Everybody, A Planet Turns on its Axis without Permission, The Blood of Stars and Deep Breath, Raqs follows the quiet life of matter: coal, salt, iron, water, air. These elements become vessels for remembrance, carrying traces of lost landscapes, cosmic histories, violence and survival. The films shift between the geological and the intimate, the submerged and the celestial, asking us to see the earth beyond the ground beneath us as something continually becoming. Together, these works form a passage through time where matter holds memories, bodies resonate, and distant histories surface in the present.
Travelling from Ladakh to Delhi in a separate register of time from the physical works in the exhibition, the videos foreground the accelerated, ephemeral nature of travelling: they carry fragments of thoughts across distance, even as this presentation remains rooted in the independence of each work. These videos, not previously shown in Delhi, complete a circuit between Ladakh and the city. They are not documentaries, but works to be encountered as experiences.
The screening is both a continuation and an invitation: to encounter a part of the Ladakh programme in Delhi and to consider how materials gather and form a whole. In this movement, the videos reaffirm the continuity between Raqs’ utopic, humanist values and the relationship between the earth and the forces that sustain life.
SCHEDULE · Saturday, 10 October · 4-7:30 PM
TIME | SESSION | DETAILS |
|---|---|---|
4:00 pm | Introduction | Opening Remarks |
4:10 pm | Screening (50 min)  | Provisions for Everybody, 2018 An eccentric itinerary between Northern England, Eastern India, Myanmar (Burma) and Catalonia. |
5:00 pm | Panel Discussion | In conversation Qamoos Bukhari, Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Meera Menezes. |
5:45 pm | Screening (13 min)  | The Blood of Stars, 2017 An invitation to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. |
Screening (18 min 4 sec)  | A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission (2018) A turn to the Rann of Kutch, where salt stretches between sea and land, dazzling the horizon. | |
Screening (25 min)  | Deep Breath, 2019 A phrase that is inscribed onto the sea floor and then filmed. | |
6:45 pm | Conclusion | Closing Remarks followed by Tea & Refreshments |
In Conversation
About the Collective
Raqs Media Collective (*1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) finds itself at the nexus of contemporary art, historical enquiry, and philosophical speculation. In several languages, the word “raqs” denotes a state of revolution, whirling and turning into an intensified state of awareness. They interpret it as ‘kinetic contemplation’- a restless and energetic entanglement with the world and time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation.
Time is Never Ripe
Qamoos Bukhari presents four video works by Raqs Media Collective at Anant Foundation for the Arts in continuation of Time Is Never Ripe, the collective’s recently concluded show at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation which was curated by him and supported by RMZ Foundation. The exhibition marked Raqs’ institutional solo presence in India for over a decade, following Asamayavali / Untimely Calendar at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, in 2014.
Across the series of artists' films: Provisions for Everybody, A Planet Turns on its Axis without Permission, The Blood of Stars and Deep Breath, Raqs follows the quiet life of matter: coal, salt, iron, water, air. These elements become vessels for remembrance, carrying traces of lost landscapes, cosmic histories, violence and survival. The films shift between the geological and the intimate, the submerged and the celestial, asking us to see the earth beyond the ground beneath us as something continually becoming. Together, these works form a passage through time where matter holds memories, bodies resonate, and distant histories surface in the present.
Travelling from Ladakh to Delhi in a separate register of time from the physical works in the exhibition, the videos foreground the accelerated, ephemeral nature of travelling: they carry fragments of thoughts across distance, even as this presentation remains rooted in the independence of each work. These videos, not previously shown in Delhi, complete a circuit between Ladakh and the city. They are not documentaries, but works to be encountered as experiences.
The screening is both a continuation and an invitation: to encounter a part of the Ladakh programme in Delhi and to consider how materials gather and form a whole. In this movement, the videos reaffirm the continuity between Raqs’ utopic, humanist values and the relationship between the earth and the forces that sustain life.
SCHEDULE · Saturday, 10 October · 4-7:30 PM
TIME | SESSION | DETAILS |
|---|---|---|
4:00 pm | Introduction | Opening Remarks |
4:10 pm | Screening (50 min) | Provisions for Everybody, 2018 An eccentric itinerary between Northern England, Eastern India, Myanmar (Burma) and Catalonia. |
5:00 pm | Panel Discussion | In conversation Qamoos Bukhari, Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Meera Menezes. |
5:45 pm | Screening (13 min) | The Blood of Stars, 2017 An invitation to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. |
Screening (18 min 4 sec) | A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission (2018) A turn to the Rann of Kutch, where salt stretches between sea and land, dazzling the horizon. | |
Screening (25 min) | Deep Breath, 2019 A phrase that is inscribed onto the sea floor and then filmed. | |
6:45 pm | Conclusion | Closing Remarks followed by Tea & Refreshments |
In Conversation
About the Collective
Raqs Media Collective (*1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) finds itself at the nexus of contemporary art, historical enquiry, and philosophical speculation. In several languages, the word “raqs” denotes a state of revolution, whirling and turning into an intensified state of awareness. They interpret it as ‘kinetic contemplation’- a restless and energetic entanglement with the world and time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation.
AFA FILMS
Time Is Never Ripe
Screening four video works by Raqs Media Collective, in continuation of their recently concluded solo show at the LAMO, curated by Qamoos Bukhari.
