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Timely Concordances, Untimely Calendars

Raqs Media Collective, However Incongruous, 2011.

Lecture

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

Join us for an engaging conversation between artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta, of the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, and Homi Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, at Harvard University. Sengupta will speak about Raqs’ multifaceted research-based work, exploring topics such as the legacies of imperial power to contemporary relationships to time and temporality.

About the Raqs Media Collective:
Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, and sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They create installations; make videos, photographs, print and online works; play with archival traces; make exhibitions and art interventions in public spaces; write essays; enact lecture-performances; engage with pedagogical procedures; edit books; design events; and foster collaborations. They have worked with architects, scholars, coders, writers, designers, translators, performers, artists, curators, and theatre directors, and founded processes that have become an influential force in contemporary intellectual and cultural life.

Raqs has exhibited widely, including at Documenta and the Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney, and Sao Paulo Biennales. They have had solo shows in museums and educational and independent art spaces in Boston, Brussels, Madrid, Delhi, Shanghai, London, New York, and Toronto, among others. Works by Raqs are part of several contemporary art collections and museums, and their essays have been published in numerous anthologies. Raqs curated Rest of Now, Manifesta 7 (Bolzano, 2008), Sarai Reader 09 (Gurgaon, 2012–13) and INSERT2014 (Delhi, 2014).

Co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center and the South Asia Institute at Harvard University.

This event will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Free admission. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, in Cambridge.

This lecture is part of the series What Is to Be Undone? Modernism in the 21st Century, by Ahmet Öğüt, Fernanda Fragateiro, Raqs Media Collective, and Renée Green, which will feature workshops and lectures throughout the month of April at the Harvard Art Museums. During each “intervention,” one artist or collective will interrogate specific cultural objects, both within the Harvard Art Museums collections and beyond, as sites of exchange, contestation, restitution, and critique. The series is bookended by two related exhibitions, The Way We Live Now: Modernist Ideologies at Work (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, February 5–April 5, 2015) and Jesse Aron Green: Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Harvard Art Museums, May 23–August 9, 2015). The series considers how artists today use a variety of research methodologies to reimagine the lasting and conflicted legacies of modernism in the contemporary moment.

Support for this program is provided by the Widgeon Charitable Trust and the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.