As part of ICI’s Curator’s Perspective— an itinerant public discussion series featuring national and international curators— Shuddhabrata Sengupta of the Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi presents on Raqs’ recent curatorial projects.

For his Curator’s Perspective talk, Sengupta discusses the modalities of occasional curating situated within a collective artistic practice. The Raqs Collective’s practice straddles artistic work, curatorial projects, theoretical interventions, critical writing, research and teaching. This variety is often perceived as if it were a series of very different moves. For Raqs, the line between artistic, intellectual and curatorial work, though present, is a set of shifting markers. Sengupta will make a case for the interweaving of different strands within the practice of Raqs, and argue for a kind of fluid dynamics between the making of art, curation and critical research.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective, Delhi. 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, 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, 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). In 2000, Raqs co-founded the Sarai initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, and the Sarai Reader Series, which they edited till 2013. They have been invited to teach in many institutions and self-organised initiatives. Raqs received the Multitude Art Prize in 2013. Sengupta is the current (2015-2016) Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with the Center for Curatorial Studies (Hessel Museum of Art) and the Human Rights Program at Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, NY.

The Curator’s Perspective is a free, itinerant public discussion series ICI developed as a way for national and international curators to share their research and experiences with audiences in New York. These talks provide ICI the opportunity to assemble documentation on and disseminate information about a wide variety of international perspectives on art today. In 2015, audiences will hear perspectives on art, culture, and exhibition-making from curators based in Chicago, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Munich, and New Delhi. Practitioners will talk about what they’re most interested in at the moment, including the artists and the sociopolitical contexts that are shaping practices now.

The Curator’s Perspective series has been made possible, in part, by grants from the Hartfield Foundation and by generous contributions from the ICI Board of Trustees and ICI Access Fund.