{"id":118919,"date":"2026-08-22T06:06:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T06:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/118919\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T06:06:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T06:06:47","slug":"how-raqs-media-collective-uses-the-shamiana-as-a-symbol-of-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/118919\/","title":{"rendered":"How Raqs Media Collective Uses the Shamiana as a Symbol of Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u2014 a cloth traditionally used as a ceremonial tent in India and south Asia, but which is also an enduring symbol of resistance.<\/p>\n

Before arriving in Ladakh earlier this month \u2014 for Raqs Media Collective\u2019s first solo in India in a decade \u2014 the shamiana was in Zurich\u2019s Migros Museum f\u00fcr Gegenwartskunst as part of another show, \u2018Disobedience Archive (Canopy for Broken Time)\u2019 for four months till May.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cwatershed\u201d moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a moment of renewal and transformation. There\u2019s a new generation thinking creatively about its future and politics. It is good for everyone,\u201d says Shuddhabrata Sengupta over a Zoom call, on a rainy Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n

Mining for the Political<\/p>\n

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 \u201ckinetic contemplation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Bagchi, Sengupta and Monica Narula \u2014 former students of Delhi\u2019s Jamia Millia Islamia \u2014 formed the collective in 1992 while working on their first film, \u2018Half the Night Left, and the Universe to Comprehend\u2019.<\/p>\n

Over the last three decades, this curiosity-driven restlessness has come to define their aesthetic \u2014 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, \u2018The Blood of Stars\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

Raqs<\/a> works in what Narula terms the \u201csubterranean political\u201d, where politics is inseparable from the quotidian. \u201cEverything one does has a bearing on their surroundings. One gives back into the landscape \u2014 urban, emotional, community, aesthetic and poetic. We\u2019re all making these ecologies together, and the political is immanent. It is important not to see them as separate,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 Protest. \u201cI hope that the demands of art, life and freedom will make the judges make sensible decisions on how Srishti will live,\u201d he wrote after visiting Gupta in prison.<\/p>\n

The Disobedient Tent<\/p>\n

At other times, the art and the politics intermingle more visibly, like in their presentation of art theorist Marco Scotini\u2019s \u2018Disobedience Archive\u2019 \u2014 an evolving video archive exploring intersections of art and dissent \u2014 in Zurich earlier this year.<\/p>\n

They chose 50 films, including Sanjay Kak\u2019s \u2018Words on Water\u2019, that expose the faultlines \u2014 ecological, political, technological \u2014 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. \u201cThe 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\u2026 reflecting upon something we have lived with and asking what the effective exchange between us and that thing is,\u201d says Narula.<\/p>\n

The idea was also to qualify the very act of disobedience. \u201cIt\u2019s not simply saying no. It\u2019s epistemic disobedience\u2026 knowing that you are creating something,\u201d Bagchi adds.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 \u2018The Time is Never Ripe\u2019. For what? \u201cPlucking an apricot,\u201d Bagchi analogises. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to pluck it until it is ready, but if you wait too long, it falls and squashes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this \u201crefusal of finality\u201d, the shamiana takes on an evolving form through Zurich, Jantar Mantar, Ladakh and wherever it is headed next.<\/p>\n

\"Raqs Raqs Media Collective\u2019s Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Monica Narula (Photo by Kato Hajime)
\nBetween \u2018Not Yet\u2019 & \u2018Has Been\u2019<\/p>\n

Amid the quiet of Ladakh, the canopy assumes a renewed meaning as Ferment, but no less political. It shelters six other works, including \u2018Communard Biscuits\u2019 (2017) that recalls the Paris Commune of 1871 and \u2018Waiting\u2019 (2013) that brackets time between the states of \u2018not yet\u2019 and \u2018has been\u2019 in a stencil, thereby turning into a guardian of shared human history.<\/p>\n

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 \u201clayer cake\u201d. \u201cYou have different layers of time compressed on top of, and seeping into, each other.\u201d And the 300-year-old, two-storey LAMO building,made of mud becomes one of the strata.<\/p>\n

In \u2018The Wayfarer series\u2019, time becomes a companion. It features prints of photographs of the Ladakh landscape, on which are outlined animals \u2014 beasts of all kinds \u2014 in glitter that are wayfaring with us. \u201cHistories often coalesce around ideas of distortion and non-normativity,\u201d Narula says.<\/p>\n

Pluralism has been crucial to the collective\u2019s internal functioning as well. There are \u201cdisagreements constantly\u201d, but Bagchi describes theirs as a heterarchical model, \u201cwhere there is no singular moment of consolidation of roles\u201d.<\/p>\n

The sense of solidarity is also at the heart of \u2018Comic Contempt\u2019 (2021). Looking at humour as a form of dissent, it features panels bearing fragments of text to show how comedy can undermine authority. \u201cIt is particularly relevant today where there\u2019s a lack of understanding of the language a younger generation uses,\u201d Sengupta says.<\/p>\n

What happens then, when something history cannot categorise tries to be part of it? Do you dismiss it as the \u2018other\u2019 or let it join the cavalcade? Do you comply or do you turn disobedient?<\/p>\n

The time to open up the shamiana again is never ripe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The colourful fabric with the navratna pattern, spilling across the ceiling and walls of the 17th-century LAMO (Ladakh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[6],"tags":[58045,51949,58042,58036,58046,58039,58040,58038,58043,58035,58048,58041,58037,58044,58047,51],"class_list":["post-118919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-zurich","tag-art-as-dissent","tag-contemporary-indian-art","tag-disobedience-archive-zurich","tag-jeebesh-bagchi","tag-kinetic-contemplation","tag-ladakh-arts-and-media-organisation","tag-lamo-leh","tag-monica-narula","tag-political-art-installations","tag-raqs-media-collective","tag-rmz-foundation","tag-shamiana-resistance-symbol","tag-shuddhabrata-sengupta","tag-srishti-gupta-support","tag-the-time-is-never-ripe-exhibition","tag-zurich"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/117137662883414236","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}