Capturing time with art- a Raqs Media collective exhibit

An attempt to capture time in its various dimensions has been made through a series of old and new artworks by city-based artist group Raqs Media Collective.
In a set of 40-odd artworks comprising printed media, video installations, sculptures, photography or differently assembled mediums, the artists attempt to represent how timeliness are interpreted differently by each individual.
The exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art titled, "Asamyavali/The Untimely Calendar," takes the viewer through different dimensions of time. The current show is part of a series of solo exhibitions, being organised at NGMA.
"It offers a working mill of ideas, that faces the future, a way of reading contemporaneity and a conversation of how to be with time," said Monica Narula, co-founder of the artist collective.

The trio -- Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta -- who founded the collective has been working together for the past 22 years and has participated in international contemporary art festivals such as the Documenta 11 and the biennales in Venice.
The exhibition was inaugurated here late last evening by Ravindra Singh, Secretary, Culture Ministry along with Okwui Enwezor, Director of Haus Der Kunst, a non-collecting art museum in Munich, Germany.

"It is a good opportunity for the public and media to realize that art is just not the about producing comfortable images for consumption," Singh said.
"The best kind of art raises the bar for public discourse in any society, it allows for the considered asking of difficult and necessary questions, it gives to our conversations a philosophical depth and to our dreams and desires a sharp edge," he said.

Queried on the choice of subject for the show, Sengupta said, "Time is one thing we all experience. Be it time wasting or passing time, we are interested in building those kinds of links with human beings based on what we all experience.