Raqs Media Collective: Wayfaring Ways To Be

Artist Conversation: Saturday, 15th March 2025, 2:30 to 4pm

Opening Reception: Saturday, 15th March, 4 to 6pm

Performance: Friday, 28th March, 2025 (time to be announced)

Exhibition Period: 15th March – 3rd May, 2025

Hanart TZ Gallery
2/F Mai On Industrial Building,
17-21 Kung Yip Street,
Kwai Chung, Hong Kong

T: +852 2526 9019
E: hanart@hanart.com

Hanart TZ Gallery is delighted to present Wayfaring Ways To Be, the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong by the internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist collective Raqs Media Collective.

Based in New Delhi, Raqs Media Collective are artists, curators, and thinkers. Founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, the collective’s practice spans the making of installations, films, events and publications, in addition to collaborations across architecture, literature, science, and theatre. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. They have been exhibited widely, including at Documenta, the Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney and Sao Paulo Biennales. 

Raqs Media Collective
From the left: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Responding to a world caught in awe today by artificial intelligence, Raqs Media Collective ponders and propositions us to rethink the human being, a species distinguished by thinking, speaking and walking upright:

“Walking demands a philosophy. Thinking requires thought. How does that redefine our humanity? Do we ‘speak in tongues’ (glossolalia) or do we ‘hold our tongue’ (silence)? How to transgress the boundaries of flesh and feeling to imagine ourselves as a cavalcade of images, characters, ideas – something fun, celebratory, dark, ominous, thoughtful – all at once – so that the ‘new normal’ of the unbearably absurd is held up to scrutiny, effectively?”

Wayfaring Ways To Be is the latest project by Raqs with responses to this question. The exhibition features over 60 pieces of mixed and multi-media works, in the form of scenarios, diagrams, landscapes and characters. The Artist Conversation and Opening Reception will take place on Saturday, 15thMarch 2025 at Hanart TZ Gallery.

On 28th March, the collective will also bring us a Performative Work atthe gallery, engaging with public creative response, to explore how the boundaries of flesh transgress.

The exhibition will continue through 3rd May 2025.

Raqs Media Collective
Wayfarers
2025   Glitter Drawings on photographic prints   46 x 30.5 cm

Wayfaring Ways To Be

Raqs Media Collective

“A tongue attempts to form language anew.”
“Measures the unspoken, with the untasted, on the ground of the untested.”

“Three-legged time comes calling, to project their unfiltered, muttering, thought-stream.”
“With tri-ped, or tripod, comes an entourage, attendants and accomplices.”

“Recall the hurrah and the harrumph of the wild mountain god Shiva’s bacchanalian wedding procession.”

(Communication from wayfarers)

Two things distinguish the human species: an ability to walk upright, and a capacity to think, straight and crooked. Walking expands horizons. Eyes travel further. Thinking loosens the tongue, in joy, in awe, in shame, in audacity. We begin talking, and we have not stopped.

With the invention of the internal combustion engine, the task of transportation is achieved more efficiently by machines. Bipedal human beings had to find reasons to ask themselves why they needed to keep walking, and where they are going. With the rise of artificial intelligence, machines have begun undertaking a large spectrum of the functions once subsumed under ‘thinking’. The bicameral brains of human beings now need to ask why and what still needs thinking, or talking about.

This is a point of calibration, of reset. Today we can ask, ‘why walk?’; ‘why think?’; ‘why talk?’. Walking demands a philosophy. Thinking requires thought. How does that redefine our humanity? Do we ‘speak in tongues’ (glossolalia) or do we ‘hold our tongue’ (silence)? Do we multiply, or divide, to contain forms of being that are more than human, other than human? How to transgress the boundaries of flesh and feeling to imagine ourselves as a cavalcade of images, characters, ideas – something fun, celebratory, dark, ominous, thoughtful – all at once – so that the ‘new normal’ of the unbearably absurd is held up to scrutiny, effectively? That is the question.

Raqs Media Collective mark their moment with Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, with responses to this question in the form scenarios, diagrams, landscapes and characters. All sorts of beings and un-becomings, dream-drones and dragons, cyborgs, goblins and angels, ghosts and aliens, and a few sly trespassers from ordinary life, in drag or disguise, may be found here.

This walking-thinking-talking-dreaming procession has the feel of a radical rapture, but also has the granular texture of the realities and dreams of our time. Some of them seem to recall extinct life forms. But what if the things we call extinct are actually just invisible, in hiding? They may have chosen to conceal themselves in plain sight, or to have withdrawn from the gaze of scrutiny. The figures are as viscous as winter fog in a breathless city. Some, however, are as wispy and insubstantial as a troubled exhalation on a pane of glass. Some are as clear as a face in a mirror, but as opaque as a mask. They form outlines, possibilities, morphing from two to three to more dimensions.

Fading. Forming. Fading. Forming.
Beasts, robots, aliens, ghosts, goblins, minor gods trying to be humans, human figures of all kinds trying to be gods, rendered in wallpaper, fabric, prints and video.

Hybrids icons from the deep past and the deep future beckon, and they have made Raqs their interlocutor. Join the wayfarers.

Raqs Media Collective
Chimera Chorus
2025    Embroidery on organza, velvet backing   183 x 112 cm