The colourful fabric with the navratna pattern, spilling across the ceiling and walls of the 17th-century LAMO (Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation) building in Leh, is a familiar sight. It is the shamiana — a cloth traditionally used as a ceremonial tent in India and south Asia, but which is also an enduring symbol of resistance.
Before arriving in Ladakh earlier this month — for Raqs Media Collective’s first solo in India in a decade — the shamiana was in Zurich’s Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst as part of another show, ‘Disobedience Archive (Canopy for Broken Time)’ for four months till May.
As it moved from Zurich to Ladakh, its transit, as if to make a metaphorical pit-stop, coincided with another movement in Delhi last month: the student protest against the country’s fragile education system in Jantar Mantar. It was under a different canopy but, by extension, Raqs and its shamiana became witnesses to what Jeebesh Bagchi, one of the co-founders, calls a “watershed” moment.
“It’s a moment of renewal and transformation. There’s a new generation thinking creatively about its future and politics. It is good for everyone,” says Shuddhabrata Sengupta over a Zoom call, on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
Mining for the Political
This churning forms the core of Raqs Media Collective that borrows its name from the Sufi word meaning the whirling of a dervish. In essence, it encapsulates the paradoxical idea of “kinetic contemplation”.
Bagchi, Sengupta and Monica Narula — former students of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia — formed the collective in 1992 while working on their first film, ‘Half the Night Left, and the Universe to Comprehend’.
Over the last three decades, this curiosity-driven restlessness has come to define their aesthetic — artistic and political, with a practice spanning films, installation and photography. But, it was never just about art or politics for them. Take their 2017 film, ‘The Blood of Stars’, which was screened in Ladakh. Shot in Lulea, Sweden, it explores human-nature conflict through the story of iron, pointing to the irony of how a life-giving metal is also responsible for environmental destruction. Think mining.
Raqs works in what Narula terms the “subterranean political”, where politics is inseparable from the quotidian. “Everything one does has a bearing on their surroundings. One gives back into the landscape — urban, emotional, community, aesthetic and poetic. We’re all making these ecologies together, and the political is immanent. It is important not to see them as separate,” she says.
The inextricability was most recently evident when Sengupta came out in support of fellow artist Srishti Gupta, who has been incarcerated since April 2026 for participating in Noida Workers’ Protest. “I hope that the demands of art, life and freedom will make the judges make sensible decisions on how Srishti will live,” he wrote after visiting Gupta in prison.
The Disobedient Tent
At other times, the art and the politics intermingle more visibly, like in their presentation of art theorist Marco Scotini’s ‘Disobedience Archive’ — an evolving video archive exploring intersections of art and dissent — in Zurich earlier this year.
They chose 50 films, including Sanjay Kak’s ‘Words on Water’, that expose the faultlines — ecological, political, technological — of our collapsing world and screened each under a different version of the canopy. In an act of repair, it attempted to mend the fissures in time between the protest on screen and the moment of watching it together. “The shamiana has been an important metaphor for us, yet it is not a metaphor at all. It is a reality we have all grown up with… reflecting upon something we have lived with and asking what the effective exchange between us and that thing is,” says Narula.
The idea was also to qualify the very act of disobedience. “It’s not simply saying no. It’s epistemic disobedience… knowing that you are creating something,” Bagchi adds.
For Raqs, the shamiana, the gatherings, the thinking and the questioning have been a way of life that finds perfect articulation in the title of their ongoing Ladakh exhibition — ‘The Time is Never Ripe’. For what? “Plucking an apricot,” Bagchi analogises. “You don’t want to pluck it until it is ready, but if you wait too long, it falls and squashes.”
In this “refusal of finality”, the shamiana takes on an evolving form through Zurich, Jantar Mantar, Ladakh and wherever it is headed next.
Raqs Media Collective’s Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Monica Narula (Photo by Kato Hajime)
Between ‘Not Yet’ & ‘Has Been’
Amid the quiet of Ladakh, the canopy assumes a renewed meaning as Ferment, but no less political. It shelters six other works, including ‘Communard Biscuits’ (2017) that recalls the Paris Commune of 1871 and ‘Waiting’ (2013) that brackets time between the states of ‘not yet’ and ‘has been’ in a stencil, thereby turning into a guardian of shared human history.
Through 25 works in all, the exhibition, supported by the RMZ Foundation, brings together these multiple temporalities. Sengupta wants us to look at it as a “layer cake”. “You have different layers of time compressed on top of, and seeping into, each other.” And the 300-year-old, two-storey LAMO building,made of mud becomes one of the strata.
In ‘The Wayfarer series’, time becomes a companion. It features prints of photographs of the Ladakh landscape, on which are outlined animals — beasts of all kinds — in glitter that are wayfaring with us. “Histories often coalesce around ideas of distortion and non-normativity,” Narula says.
Pluralism has been crucial to the collective’s internal functioning as well. There are “disagreements constantly”, but Bagchi describes theirs as a heterarchical model, “where there is no singular moment of consolidation of roles”.
The sense of solidarity is also at the heart of ‘Comic Contempt’ (2021). Looking at humour as a form of dissent, it features panels bearing fragments of text to show how comedy can undermine authority. “It is particularly relevant today where there’s a lack of understanding of the language a younger generation uses,” Sengupta says.
What happens then, when something history cannot categorise tries to be part of it? Do you dismiss it as the ‘other’ or let it join the cavalcade? Do you comply or do you turn disobedient?
The time to open up the shamiana again is never ripe.