Raqs Media Collective: 1980 in Parallax

The Jencks Foundation presents 1980 in Parallax, an exhibition by New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective on display at The Cosmic House in London. Raqs Media Collective’s work is located at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research, theory and poetry. It is a hybrid practice and methodology that finds correspondence with Charles Jencks’ work as designer, critic, historian, concrete poet and artist, and with his Post-Modernist manifesto and former home turned Grade I listed museum, The Cosmic House.

The exhibition 1980 in Parallax centres around a new commission titled The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone. It uses the concept of parallax—which describes the changing perception of objects in relation to their background, based on the position and movement of the viewer. The work borrows the term to describe perceptions of a particular moment in history while moving through time; folding time, space, imagery and narrative to interrogate varied geographies of perceived centres and peripheries.

Shot in New Delhi’s hinterland, places of wilderness in-between and at the edge of other places, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone sees Raqs Media Collective experiment with new visual textures achieved through nesting, embedding, and juxtaposing contemporary footage with found archival images, some of which have been sourced from Jencks’ travels in India in the 1980s. This polyphony of visual registers is accompanied by a single voice narration; a monologue about time, memory, and history that lapses between scales of temporality and implies a spectral plurality of time.

The film’s main protagonist is the figure of the bicyclist whose circular and repetitive journey invokes an explorative and meditative mood. Using temporal and geographical zooms, shifts and overlays a contemplative landscape is created, at once personal and public. The film is extended into physical space of The Cosmic House through a set of animated topological shapes and time cones that appear and disappear on screen, and in Raqs Media Collective’s wall drawings and AR ‘interferences’ entitled Betaal Tareef: In Praise of Off-time (and its Entities).

Raqs Media Collective said: “The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone is an investigation into the optics of this specific sensation of time, which has become second nature for us since 1980. It is a time traveling search into and out of a year—that pause between turbulences—a pause that lurks in every year of what we call our long now.”

Eszter Steierhoffer, Artistic Director of the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House and curator of the exhibition said: “Raqs Media Collective’s exhibition 1980 in Parallax oscillates between fact and fiction while describing 1980 as a transient moment that left a significant mark on our collective imaginaries. Sharing an affinity with The Cosmic House—another complex diagram of time—the film invites us to think about temporality and offers a method of “kinetic contemplation” to destabilise mainstream narratives. Raqs Media Collective’s work extends the physical architecture of the house and its potential interpretations.”

Lily Jencks, Director of the Jencks foundation at The Cosmic House said “Raqs Media Collective’s captivating exhibition reframes our understanding of a key year in the design of The Cosmic House, and Charles’ intellectual work on the first Architectural Biennale in 1980: revealing slippages in time, space and concept, providing us with a richer way to think about the Jencks Foundations’ intellectual project as a historical archive in a contemporary institution’.

The exhibition launches the Jencks Foundation’s first research theme, ‘isms and ‘wasms: 1980 in Parallax, an exercise in remapping the year 1980, looking back—once again—in order to look forward and reconsider the postmodern canon from critical distance and from parallax views. This theme will be developed over the year through seminars, commissions and salons, more details of which will be published on the foundation’s website throughout 2023.