Raqs Media Collective: The Laughter of Tears

Kunstverein Braunschweig is pleased to present the exhibition The Laughter of Tears by Raqs Media Collective, which will be on view until November 28, 2021.

Raqs Media Collective combines a philosophical attitude with a distinct aesthetic flair for creating intense sensory fields. This is evident in the installations, video and graphic works that constitute The Laughter of Tears, as well as in the text they offer in accompaniment to the exhibition.

The Laughter of Tears is a distillation of the way in which Raqs is experiencing and responding to this present time and its immediate past. Very concretely, the years 2020 and 2021 which will be remembered as being unimaginably difficult across the world, are triggers for reflections that crystallize into several new works, and re-takes of some extant work, all of which cohere to form this multi-layered exhibition.

The spectrum it embraces is both intimate as well as historical—from a presence as subtle as a virus that can induce breathlessness and alter the way we experience time (and hence its ‘colour’), to the rhythm of pause and persistence in popular protest movements in India that catalysed forms of gathering under flamboyantly simple canopies.

The exhibition begins and ends under the sonic shadow of a gathering of birds. Their chorus as they return to a roosting site reminds us of the legend of the ‘conference of the birds’ which expressed the simple truth that the sovereign which the birds were looking for was in fact their togetherness, and their flight path.

A debate on who or what is, or can be, “the sovereign,” is at the heart of the question that Raqs grapple with here. They do this by pointing to emotion, to engagement with life forms, and to the uncontainable bodily responses of laughter, and tears, as a set of philosophical resources that can enable the questioning or re-structuring of contemporary dynamics of power.

By staging the shadow of a chance encounter between the historical/literary figure Till Eulenspiegel and his distant cognate Mulla Nasreddin, the exhibition turns to humor and its political and social force, its benefits and its dangers.

Both Eulenspiegel and Nasruddin are read as gentle saboteurs of pomp and circumstance. They are pranksters and anti-heroes, figures of fun and fearless frolic who can look power, and the frozen structures of social convention, in the face. Laughter, even the kind that sticks in our throats, becomes a force to reckon with—not least in view of the punishments and harsh restrictions that comedians experience when they use their language and humor to utter a counter-opinion to the powerful in political regimes. The Laughter of Tears is about the joke, the most rousing laughter, so much so that it brings tears to our eyes, and at the same moment it is about the deep pain, the sadness, the loss.

The photograph taken of a tear under the microscope at Johns Hopkins University by Norm Barker is used by Raqs Media Collective as source material for a captivating animation, reflecting not only the different scenarios that can cause you to tear up but also the unifying notion of the human body and its chemical composition. The floating image of illuminated elements of water, proteins, enzymes and salt—unique in its structure—brings us back to the equalizing idea that we are made from the same fabric living together under the same roof.

The exhibition—and each individual work within it—is an invitation to engage, to linger in the spaces and to spend time there. It is about nothing less than a shared presence in situ, where “art as place” (Raqs Media Collective) is experienced.

Design/Animation: Aarushi Surana
Fabrication: Shamsher Ali
Video Editing: Rajan Singh
Sound: Ish Sherawat

Raqs Media Collective would like to gratefully acknowledge Dr. Norman J. Barker, Director, Pathology Photography and Graphic Arts Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University for the source image of a magnified human tear.