Hjem Proposals for a new national memorial for 22 July Raqs Media Collective
In their sketch proposal for a new 22 July memorial site, Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective take time and movement as their starting point. They suggest creating twelve sculptural clocks in different bird formations, where integrated LED screens will display the real-time changes of the winds and tides. The memorial will also contain a glass column, which will stand like a sundial and be inscribed with the names of the seventy-seven terror victims. © Raqs Media Collective; Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta / KORO

Raqs Media Collective

How do you envision a memorial after a violent rupture of time constellations, embodied in each human being? The 22nd July memorial asks how to grieve, yet confront, that which wanted to make silent a lively society of many tongues.

Drawing on a clock fragment after the explosion, a child’s utterance to her survivor mother, the flight of birds, and an 18th century astronomical observatory in Delhi, we propose a time-oasis where we assemble, converse, mourn, reflect and wonder, with 12 bird-clocks poised between rest and ascent with time-telling wingspans, making porous forums with no centre or periphery.

We offer time itself as the material of the act of remembrance.

– Raqs Media Collective

Read the full proposal here

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Sketch proposal for a new 22 July memorial site, Raqs Media Collective. © Raqs Media Collective; Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula og Shuddhabrata Sengupta / KORO

Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective consists of Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Bagchi (born 1965), Narula (born 1969), and Sengupta (born 1968) studied at the city’s Mass Communications Research Centre at the Jamia Milia Islamia university, and formed Raqs Media Collective in 1992, following their graduation. 

 Raqs work has been shown in solo exhibitions at The Charles Jencks House, (London), Kunstverein Braunschweig (Braunschweig), K21 (Dusseldorf), MUAC (Mexico City), PROA (Buenos Aires), Mathaf (Doha), The Whitworth (Manchester), the National Gallery Modern Art (New Delhi), The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston ), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead-Newcastle),Tate Britain (London); Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong)and Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (2004), among others. 

Raqs has also been exhibited at biennials in Shanghai, Venice, Kochi, Sharjah, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Sydney and Sao Paulo as well as at Documenta 11. Works by Raqs are part of several contemporary art and museum collections. Public art works by Raqs are installed in numerous locations, ranging from Goethe University, Frankfurt to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, to sites in Otu-Noko, Japan and the Laumeiere Sculpture Park in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA.

Raqs have curated a number of exhibitions, including Hungry for Time, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2022) ; Afterglow, Yokohama Triennale (2019-2020) ; In the Open or in Stealth at MACBA, Barcelona (2016) ; Why Not Ask Again, 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016-2017); INSERT2014, Delhi (2014); Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India (2012-2013) and Manifesta 7, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy (2008).

See all ten proposals to a national memorial for 22 July here