An Aesthetic interview with the Founders of Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective (RMC) was founded in 1992 by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula who are intense artists, curators, researchers, editors, media practitioners and philosophical agent provocateurs.

- Riya Gulati

What motivates you of creating unique masterpieces? Who are your biggest artistic influences?

Our focus is on orienting ourselves to a varied sense of time. About how we experience duration, the past, the present, and the future. We are acutely sensitive to our surroundings, and receive all kinds of signals, which we process, modify and transmit. Our biggest artistic influence relates to everyday life. We have often considered the turbulence of the city, wherein challenges to sovereign power are nurtured on an almost daily basis. For instance, our recent work, The Laughter of Tears reflected on how satire and humor confront authority, in a way that moved between past and present, and different histories, including natural histories.

Which area of art are you interested in? Is there any other area you would like to discover?

The freedom that contemporary art proffers is quite expansive. It does not privilege any one medium or form. We create all types of work - be it moving images, text-image assemblages, sculptures, or digital objects. Recently, we have been thinking and doing research on Artificial Intelligence - and we are considering how that thinking might express itself in our artistic work.

What is the significance of creativity in your life?