Raqs Media Collective’s “It’s Possible Because It’s Possible” at Dos de Mayo Art Center

“It’s Possible Because It’s Possible” puts together a collection of Raqs Media Collective’s pieces, an artistic group created in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi (1966), Monica Narula (1969) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (1968). Raqs Media Collective, based in New Delhi, is a thinking laboratory that proposes aesthetics as starting point for a social and political meditation. Nowadays, Raqs collective develops installations and performances, as well as editorial and curatorial projects and educational programs by means of different practices like sociology, geography, mathematics, industrial design or urbanism. The origin of its name refers to the Persian, Arabic and Urdu terms to define a meditation state, and the English acronym «Rarely Asked Questions», a wink at «Frequently Asked Questions» we find in different websites.

“It’s Possible Because It’s Possible” is an irrefutable statement against certain defeatist determinism. Therefore, this title becomes a call or a sort of demonstration. In front of the indetermination of that I Would Prefer Not To of the character created by Melville for Bartleby, The Clerk, “It’s Possible Because It’s Possible” is a categorical affirmation, almost an imperative, on the possibility of going from the power to the act. For Raqs collective, possible and probable are distant concepts: what people imagine might happen, because, in fact, it is already happing as it is mentioned. The possibility breaks many certainties that we regularly assume in a non-critical way and take us to the labyrinth of a unique thinking. So the show analyzes Raqs Media Collective’s work as one of the possibilities of the practice, review and invention, as well as a live refutation of certain determinism that seems to attract us. This «possibility» also becomes a revulsive against the apparent obligation to accept impositions, with resignation or without it.

A catalogue with essays written by curators Ferran Barenblit and Cuauhtémoc Medina is going to be published, as well as Raqs Media Collective’s writings.

CA2M Dos de Mayo Art Center
Community of Madrid
Jun 12 – Oct 19, 2014
A project organized by CA2M Dos de Mayo Art Center, MUAC, University Museum of Contemporary Art of Mexico’s Autonomous University, and Proa Foundation, in Buenos Aires.
Curated by: Ferran Barenblit and Cuauhtémoc Medina