Double Check

This month, Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective whirl into Shanghai to curate a biennale with a mission: To ask, and ask again.

In the 25 years since Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta met as students at university and grew into Raqs Media Collective, they’ve time and again tried to comprehend the universe. They’ve done this through 16mm short fiction lms with titles like Present Imperfect, Future Tense; an educational programme called Sarai Reader; installation art like Now, Elsewhere, with clocks ticking between epiphany, awe, anxiety and ecstasy. They’ve exhibited around the world, from the Venice Biennale to Art Basel to premium galleries in New York, London, Delhi, Beijing. In the process, they say, they’ve become “agents of cosmic entropy”, growing more “whimsical, irascible, affectionate and inquisitive” over time.

They’ve channelled it all into the task at hand: To dress up the Shanghai Power Station of Art, and the Chinese city’s streets, for the XIth Shanghai Biennale. The collective tells GQ why now’s the time to visit, and what to expect.

On the Biennale:

[Curating the XIth Shanghai Biennale] has been a rich and rewarding experience. Shanghai is in many ways a city that lives with one foot in the future, and we are interested in futurity as a fertile and febrile condition. We think that the biennale is a place where the public goes to meet its own futurity, when it acts true to its potential.