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3/9/2009

Art Now Lightbox

Tate Britain, London

Variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators and even 'catalysts of cultural processes', the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective has been producing innovative projects since 1992.

The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet is a newly commissioned film installation that combines historical photographs from collections in London and Delhi with video, animation, and a soundscape of overlapping voices.

Stories leak, histories collide; bones, bodies, faces and handwriting blur; crowds gather and move en masse. Intentionally open-ended and anti-documentary, the work examines how collectivity and anonymity have been represented over time and how, in the present, the conditions of post-colonialism and globalisation contribute to an ongoing crisis of identity and entitlement.

A development of the lecture-performance format commonly employed by the artists, presented as a sequence of short films within films, this moving-image artwork uses techniques of juxtaposition to converge a set of histories with the present. Stories leak, histories collide; bones, bodies, faces and handwriting blur; crowds gather and move en masse.

Reflecting upon the ways in which ethnicity and ‘type’ have been characterised, animated elements resemble scientific instruments, such as those once used to measure the human skull in an attempt to determine levels of intelligence or those used to extract biometric data from today’s passports.

Photographs of institutionalised individuals by Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century anthropologist interested in the synthesis of human typologies, are layered into video footage capturing the movement of people from place to place.

Installation elements frame the film within a setting for a lecture: a table, chair and microphone, an invitation to be seated, an absent speaker and the anticipation of discourse.

Intentionally open-ended and anti-documentary, the work examines how collectivity and anonymity have been represented over time and how, in the present, the conditions of post-colonialism and globalisation contribute to an ongoing crisis of identity and entitlement.

Photographs by Francis Galton are re-produced within the artwork with permission from the Galton Papers, UCL Special Collections.

The photograph by Felice Beato is reproduced within the artwork with permission from the Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi. Courtesy of the Artists and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Artist-talk: Friday 4 September, 18.20 - 18.50
Duffield Room, Tate Britain

Press Officer
Daisy Mallabar Tel: +44 (0)207 8878731 Email: daisy.mallabar@tate.org.uk

Tate Britain
Millbank - London
Tate Britain is open daily, 10.00-17.50
Exhibitions 10.00-17.40 (last admission 17.00)
Free admission

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