Monica Narula

Monica Narula is an artist and curator based between Zurich and New Delhi. She holds a BA in English Literature, and her postgraduate training is in cinematography and filmmaking – leading to a deep interest in the fantasy of the image. Alongside Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Narula is co-founder and member of the Raqs Media Collective. Found in 1992, the word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. The collective have also curated exhibitions, staged situations, and collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers, curators, and theatre directors. Their works have been presented internationally at most major scenarios, from documenta to the Venice Biennale, as well as solo museum exhibitions. Raqs have curated large scale exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale and In the Open or in Stealth at MACBA, Barcelona. They co-founded Sarai—the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi—in 2001, where they initiated processes that have left deep impact on contemporary culture in India, and where they also edited the Sarai Reader series (01-09).

Ferment: Exhibition as Epistemic Collider

An exhibition generates unpredictable knowledge encounters the way ferment does — by holding warmth, porous enclosures, varying duration, and restless cultures in proximity and not necessarily in synchronicity with one another. It allows for mutations and movements to appear and it draws unlikely lines of affection and disruption. Objects, images, words carry discursive forces of their own. An exhibition becomes a site of learning ways in which knowledge moves intensely and intimately between places, lives and moods, in every direction at once. Visitors sense these coils and challenges to read beyond what is settled in the apprehension of the world.

Monica Narula takes up this proposition through Raqs Media collective’s exhibition at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, where seven shamianas/canopies, each named Ferment — Shade, Scatter, Stitch, Shimmer, Splinter, Splendour, Swarm — sheltered fifty films of resistance and self-organisation from the Disobedience Archive created by Marco Scotini. When a single film can run two hundred and sixty-five minutes, incompletion becomes the knowledge condition: the visitor chooses, abandons, returns, edits and always in the imagined or present companionship of others.

Under a shamiana, time is measured in gestures of attentiveness rather than hours, and everyone’s learning stays open — the curator’s along with everyone else’s.

Becoming Personae

A place will answer whatever question is put to it. If we ask what is significant, the answers are already on the map. If, instead, we ask what is being practised here, the answers arrive in forms that do not resemble each other at all. There is a panoply of personae that can be seen: a person with a craft; a form of labour that has organised its own hours; the intelligence of a plant, or of an animal that knows the city better than its residents; a group who have decided together that toffee wrappers are worth keeping; a group that gathers and sings near a cemetery, year after year; a flow of money or water or permits, read off a street until it shows its politics.

Since 2016, Raqs Media Collective has been putting this question to cities — 51 Personae in Shanghai, 21 Personae in Barcelona, 18 Personae in Bangkok. In each, a group of participants quested to find and invite a set of figures, and audiences were asked to seek them out and meet them on their own ground. What makes any of these a persona is the decision to treat it as singular: to approach it on its own terms and acknowledge a way of knowing something through a singular practice.

The workshop looks at how these projects were made — how figures were found, how invitations were extended, what an encounter asks of both parties — and then turns to the work of making personae. Attention given sideways finds more world. Once a place has been read this way, it is difficult to walk through it again as though it were empty.