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March 26, 2012 – Review
Raqs Media Collective’s “Guesswork”
JJ Charlesworth
The crossed hammer-and-sickle insignia of the Bolshevik revolution has a sense of certainty to it. But it’s an old design, and a lot has happened since it first declared the coming triumph of the proletariat. So Marks (2011) the first work you see on entering Frith Street Gallery, has a sort of shock-value to its reworking of the symbol, opening up an idea that had seemed relegated to history. Set into a large mirrored rectangle is an array of red lights in the shape of an exclamation mark (standing in for the hammer) and a question mark (for the sickle), with the two forms lighting up in slow sequence. No longer the herald of the revolutionary momentum of 1917, in the hands of New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective the hammer-sickle form becomes a brilliantly succinct visual pun, which crystalizes the acute sense of uncertainty that courses through the current turmoil of the global political present. It’s a mix of exclamation and confusion that knows what it rejects but cannot define what it wishes to claim. There’s an urgency in the demands for something new, but what?
These recent works by the collective aren’t agitprop, however. Rather, they variously express the group’s …