After an interval of six years, the Raqs Media Collective returns to Nature Morte with a solo show called: A Phrase, Not A Word, featuring videos, large-scale prints, a typographic sculpture and a sound installation. Their last show at the gallery was 'There Has Been a Change of Plan‘ in August 2006.

In the meantime, Raqs have embarked on an exciting trajectory, exhibiting and developing ambitious artistic and curatorial projects around the world and gathering critical acclaim as artists and thinkers, even as they remain accessible to a wider audience by telling stories, sharing their discoveries and committing themselves to a deeply dialogic ethic of work and life. Their return to Nature Morte can be read as an account of a partial itinerary of some of their many recent artistic, intellectual, and collaborative adventures.

With “A Phrase, Not A Word”, Raqs' diverse and eclectic practice becomes a playground for ideas and reflections on conversations and the notion of language. The exhibition will gather an arsenal of images, objects, voices, replicas, shadows and organisms, and sets them to work with and against each other in order to undertake detonations at the limits of thought. Raqs observe the contest between phrases and words, playfully glossing a lively debate within the Sanskrit philosophical canon about how the making of meaning hinges on an explosion (the 'sphota') that marks the relationship between the formation of a thought, the naming of an object and the launch of an utterance.

On view will be several works never seen before in India, along with a suite of new works. Amongst the works that will be displayed at Nature Morte are “An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale,” shown as part of Raqs's exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto in 2011 and recently at their solo show for the re-opening of the legendary Photographer' s Gallery in London. This looped video glosses a photograph taken in Calcutta in the early 20th Century by the British photographer James Waterhouse depicting the interior of a Surveyor’s office with workers earnestly absorbed by their tasks to produce a calibrated meditation on stillness, duration and transformation.

Image: © Raqs Media Collective