Raqs Media Collective at Bose Pacia

Based in Delhi, Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1991 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They are co-founders of the Sarai Media Lab, which serves as their studio, hosts workshops and maintains www.sarai.net, an extensive Web site containing essays, discussion groups and interactive projects. Since 2001, the lab has published the Sarai Reader, an annual anthology that focuses on one theme per issue, such as the public domain. Raqs has been included in many international exhibitions, including the 50th Venice Biennale and Documenta 11. For their first New York exhibition, "The Imposter in the Waiting Room," the group used video, photography and texts to create an installation that explored the boundaries between public and private life, especially in situations related to immigration and travel.

The works at Bose Pacia countered vague "terrorist" fears with specific observations. One 5-by-6-foot piece combines text with color photos of airport terminals. The graphic elements are behind chicken-wire fencing and lit from the top by a glaring, naked fluorescent tube. The text narrates an encounter with a person who is trapped, living in an airport transit lounge without legal status for entry. On another wall, two 4-foot-square transparencies contain text and images from Indian newspapers and are backlit by multiple tubes that switch on and off in horizontal patterns. They are dominated by classified ads: missing person searches, compact disc replication, name-change announcements and other intimations of a world of phantom insubstantiality. Another work, this time on vellum, is covered with blueprints of roads and lots and hangs loosely in a box frame. The blueprints are interspersed with photographs of details of modern buildings, shipping containers and highways. The imagery suggests some kind of newly fabricated community (and perhaps a plot against it).

At the end of the gallery, a video projection showed a middle-aged South Asian man performing in front of a wall of shelves that holds neatly folded clothes, masks and a bowler hat. (In an accompanying catalogue text, Raqs identifies Magritte's man in a bowler hat with Fantomas, a popular character from an early-20th-century French crime novel series. They also relate the idealized, faceless symmetry of the man in the hat to the strictures of passport photos.) The man in the video changes in and out of the costumes around him, sometimes gesticulating militantly toward the viewer, sometimes looking fat and ridiculous in his underwear, sometimes climbing the shelves (as a route of escape?). His unending non-narrative activity becomes tiring, but effectively evokes the Kafkaesque frustrations that might face the immigrant.

The gallery's small back room contained only a framed facsimile of a letter written in 1837 by Ramohan Roy, a Europhile reformist. He protests the routine denial of his visa application to visit Paris. His quixotic, idealist appeal for justice contrasts sharply with the rest of the exhibition, in which justice does not seem to be expected.

Raqs's transformation of appropriated visual materials through framing and assemblage sometimes seems perfunctory. By contrast, their texts are highly wrought. In the end, Raqs's thoughtfully assembled themes across multiple mediums add up to a resonant installation.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group