Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as artists, curators, philosophical agents provocateurs, and catalysts of cultural processes. For their fifth exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, they present works centred around the form and idea of the knot – a leitmotif that moves backwards and forwards through their own history and practice.
Most recently, a series of glass knots, displayed throughout the gallery, emerge from Raqs’s film commission for the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House. This work, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone (2023), is a poetic reflection on perceptions of a particular moment in history while moving through time, past and present, interrogating varied geographies of perceived centres and peripheries.
A knot is indicative of how closely something is bound, tied up, with itself, or with something else. As a marine measure of speed, it is also suggestive of how quickly, how speedily, something moves away. Knots link worlds of passages, transitions and departures. Knots that bind, knots that fray. Tears follow knots.
We are the knot, and sometimes, we come undone. And then, it’s back to living again, to know how to thread the rope, to tie the knot, to read the wind, and to attend to care and the cosmos. – Raqs Media Collective
Accompanying these fragile forms that heed both entanglement and its challenges, are a series of carpets titled Archipelago (2024). In blue and gold, their shape and colour echoes tears and the sea. Speaking, in their placement, of land and water bodies, they also connect to the fact that the human body is a water body.
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