In Arabic, Persian and Urdu the word "raqs" indicates a whirling state of meditation. In the practice of New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, the term also stands as an acronym for "Rarely Asked Questions".
Founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, the collective focuses indeed on questioning a series of themes, including history, social issues and political philosophy in both the international and the Indian cultural context.
The collective developed their early investigations into such themes via documentary films, but in the last few years they expanded their practice, working as artists, curators, educators, writers, editors and theatre directors.
Their latest project consists in nine sculptures scattered around the Giardini at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
The pieces are all part of a project entitled "Coronation Park", the place where the Delhi Durbar (Court of Delhi) - a mass assembly that marked the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary as emperor and empress of India - took place in 1911.
Yet Raqs Media Collective's statues are quite peculiar: some of them may look like proper ones from behind, but, when you look better, you realise that in some cases the face is missing or the subject is only half present; in other cases the entire head seems to have been chopped off while the body is a hollow cave covered in a rigid mantle or cloak, a sort of empty shell.
In a statement, the members of Raqs Media Collective claimed the project is about "the inner life of power and its deepest fear, the fear of abdication".
The sculptures do indeed look like ominous and dark hollow ghost-like presences representing partial subjects stripped of their royal status. Each statue is also accompanied by a plaque with a quote from Shooting an Elephant, an essay by English author George Orwell who wrote it while serving as police officer in colonial India and Burma.
The comic effect in some cases is guaranteed: a solemnly kneeling statue with no face is accompanied by the sentence "It was at this moment, as he stood there with the weapon in his hands, that he first grasped the hollowness, the futility"; a pair of chopped legs are commemorated by a plaque reading "He was hated by large numbers of people, the only time in his life that he had been important enough for this to happen to him."
Apart from colonialism and the power of political and financial forces, there is actually another key theme tackled in the statues: the vulgarity of hierarchical authority. The fiberglass sculptures stand indeed on bitumen (oil-based tar) and paraffin (a petroleum-based wax) coated wooden pedestals, materials that point towards the hydrocarbon economy and global capitalism.
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