In the dark, low-ceilinged interior of a seventeenth-century kitchen glows a red clock. Part of Raqs Media Collective’s first solo exhibition in twelve years in their native India, “The Time is Never Ripe” at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation, the video projection Blood Moon (2025) evokes the cycles of multiple timelines and the tropes of folklore: fertility synced with the moon, stories told at the hearth, the moon’s transit in the earth’s shadow. Bringing together works that span the past fifteen years, the show combines these characteristic themes with a response to Ladakh’s setting on India’s northern edge, bordering Pakistan and China. It is currently embroiled in a movement for statehood that would restore elected self-governance, suspended since India’s controversial 2019 abrogation of the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, the territory of which Ladakh was formerly a part. Its rugged land and deeply layered past, including a period as a Silk Route stop, make it an unusual and yet appropriate site for Raqs’s work.
The physics, politics, and poetics of time have been one of the central interests of the collective’s practice since it was formed in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Monica Narula, who met as students at New Delhi’s A.J.K. Mass Communication Research Centre (MCRC). Inspired by the sight of a man dancing at the shrine of thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Nizamuddin Auliya, they named themselves for the dervish’s ecstatic whirl—the raqs or dance in Urdu, Farsi, and Arabic—citing “kinetic contemplation” as their animating philosophy. The Leh curation highlights how their practice engages the trans-Himalayan terrain and history, both ancient and contemporary.
The play between old and new manifests in Raqs’s choice of media. In the 1990s, India globalized and liberalized its economy, transforming mass communication in the country. Increasingly accessible “new media” technologies like video, computers, and the internet began to be deployed in cultural production, accompanied by the theoretical frameworks required to assess the changing public sphere. Through the decade, Raqs made documentaries for public television, including a series of interviews about the childhoods of famous Indian artists and writers. In 2000, with the exhibition of an HTML-based piece accessible on a CD-ROM, they turned to art, eventually embodying a broader shift toward a conceptually driven media practice in India’s contemporary art sphere. The use of emergent technology is a mainstay of their work: 3D printing—a process becoming mainstream in India in the mid-2010s—was used to create molds to “bake” Communard Biscuits (2017), which is on view here. The work simulates the hard black biscuits fed by prison authorities to the 1871 Paris Commune’s insurrectionaries. In Raqs’s hands, this makes a droll comment on the punitive state projecting onto dissidents its own inability to digest revolutionary time.
The metaphor of the dancer’s spin manifests across their activations, not least in the New Delhi-based Sarai media program, which the artists co-founded in 2000. For its first fifteen years, a dialogue with a dense, dynamic network of thinkers and actors cultivated artistic practices through some of the city’s subaltern communities. This collaborative tendency plays out even at modest scales: for example, An Infra-vocabulary for Capital (2023), an erect vinyl-on-wood plinth inscribed with one thousand English words evoked by “capital,” was accompanied by printed translations in Ladakh’s Bodhi and Urdu languages. Transplanted into new, specific contexts, the original work was regenerated through fresh lexical possibilities.
Working with a range of forms from the cinematic to the digital to installation, and materials as diverse as LED bulbs and textiles, Raqs is a part of a group of Indian conceptual artists who proposed the possibilities of media as method. Through acts of generation, production, and stimulation, they explored and made visible the organizing and operative conditions, rather than the objects, of contemporary life. In a work like Chromachron, Ladakh (2026), Ladakh’s recent past is rendered through asymmetrical colored bars, like an abstract calendar of crisis. The artists use the bold, graphic Pantone colors of nine years between 2003 and 2025 to mark moments of administrative, environmental, geopolitical, and civil disturbance in the region. Recalling MIDI visualizations of musical notes, the work subverts the dominant language of globalized corporate visuality to draw attention to disharmonious realities.
Time has been the dominant theme in Raqs’s practice, in a variety of interpretive incarnations: chronology, biology, geology, history, memory, and cosmology. A series titled “Wayfarers” (2025) features prints of the landscapes of Ladakh, a high-altitude plateau created through the subductions and collisions of tectonic plates. These photographs are overlaid with mysterious characters made with golden glitter—a Kali-like female entity with her tongue sticking out, and birds arranged in tableaux hinting at remote fables. The specular drawings inscribed on the depiction of planetary time connoted by the images of trans-Himalayan vistas are like mineral deposits on terrestrial surfaces. Their iconographies and glimmer make one think of the legends and treasures that traveled along the ancient Silk Route that once passed through Ladakh.
Narrative archives are also part of Pamphilos (2019), a replica of a 2000-year old terracotta cup recovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece. The original artifact’s ascent to the surface mimics a journey through historical time; Raqs’s faux-archeological version asks whether the journey might be reconstructed. Of their documentary impulse, Raqs once wrote that they “investigated these folds and fissures in the documentary mode to create correspondences between fact, facticity (the appearance of something as factual) and the imagination.”1
The collective is particularly invested in marking and measuring time as a subjective phenomenon, untethering it from regulatory infrastructures such as those of capital and government. The Assurance Clock: An Antidote for Alarmists (2018), a tabletop timepiece marking “Yesternow” and “Presentomorrow,” parodies the urgency of the workweek. Waiting (2013) is a series of colored acrylic rectangles with the phrase “{waiting}” laser-cut into them like a programming code. The work challenges the classic characterization of the act of waiting as tedious, instead making a case for the present to be fully experienced, not merely endured in anticipation of the future. The present is also the protagonist of Itineraries X (2025), a print on clear film, which features arcane visuals based on prompts shared among the artists and sourced from AI agents. One might think of “prompt” not merely in the sense of input but also in terms of immediacy, the time “right now.” In a hyper-iterative post-GPT world, the present is endless and eternal.
Cast against the backdrop of Ladakh’s historical and political geography, Raqs’s articulation of time as a complex, compossible system of relations is most acute in their approach to contemporaneity. In “What Is the Contemporary?” (2007) Giorgio Agamben defines contemporariness as “that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.”2 Raqs’s askance investigations, literal and lyrical, of past, present, and future, and the caesurae in between, arguably make their practice “untimely,” a word used, along with its Hindi equivalent, in the title of their previous retrospective in India, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 2014 (“Asamayavali / Untimely Calendar”).
Yet this untimeliness can work as an advantage. Almost a companion piece to Blood Moon, a new iteration of Seven Billion and One (2015) comprises English, Hindi, and Urdu newspapers painted over with blackboard paint and bearing variations of lemniscate in gold pigment, the figure-of-eight swirls and closely hatched strokes resembling meteor showers. The longer one looks, the more the gold patterns seem to emanate from a remote source. The work exemplifies the “tempering” of distance from their own time that characterizes Raqs’s practice. The scale of human life is obscured by the infinitude of cosmic time.
As the universe expands, time dilates and slows, while on earth it is delayed, suspended, quickened, and measured through clocks and newspapers and calendars. For Raqs Media Collective, the time is indeed never ripe; it is asymptotic, always approaching the present without coinciding with it. It is in that infinitesimal gap between temporal possibility and its realization that Raq’s untimely or asamayik gaze lands and lingers.
Raqs Media Collective’s “The Time Is Never Ripe,” curated by Qamoos Bukhari, was on view at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation from July 2 through August 31, 2026.
Raqs Media Collective, “Fact, Facticity and the Imagination,” https://works.raqsmediacollective.net/index.php/2008/02/22/fact-facticity-and-the-imagination/4095.
Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford University Press, 2009), 41.
