Press Event •  Wednesday,  September 19, 2012 •  9:00 to 10:00 am  •  Members of the Press are invited to a special preview of

 

The Great Bare Mat & Constellation: Raqs Media Collective

 

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

9 am                Welcome; coffee and tea

 

9:30 am           Remarks by Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art, and Raqs Media Collective

There will be an opportunity to preview the exhibition and meet the artists following the remarks. Press are also invited to attend the members opening of The Great Bare Mat & Constellation on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, from 7 to 9 pm.

 

RSVP and indicate which event you will attend by September 12 to mbusack@isgm.org or 617 278 5107

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: The Great Bare Mat & Constellation (projection still). Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, 2012.

 

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Presents

The Great Bare Mat & Constellation

Raqs Media Collective creates new work for the Gardner Museum

 

On View: September 20, 2012 through January 7, 2013

BOSTON, MA • August, 27, 2012  -  During their 2010 residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Raqs Media Collective experienced a private flashlight tour of the Museum galleries at night. This unique perspective inspired the artists and helped to inform some of their new work titled The Great Bare Mat & Constellation, opening September 20, 2012 at the Gardner Museum and on view through January 7, 2013. 

 

The New Delhi artist trio, the Raqs Media Collective, (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), created two distinct installations in the special exhibition galleries.  The “Great Bare Mat & Constellation” refers to a carpet, a surface for the staging of conversations, displayed at the foot of The Vinegar Tasters, a two-part 17th century Japanese screen from the Museum’s Collection.  The carpet's repeated motif, woven by a group of expert Bulgarian weavers, indexes the constellation of the Ursa Major (The Great Bear) against a background drawing, that traces the exchanges between the three personal computers of the Raqs Media Collective and the world during one hour’s time. Raqs members view time as a measure of change and are interested in thinking about how our sense of time as human beings has accelerated, fragmented, and intensified in this century.  The intense criss-crossing patterns of the carpet demonstrate the intricacy, complexity, and global quality of contemporary communication set against the ancient and leisurely nightly pass time of star gazing.

 

Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Gardner Museum, said she views Raqs as responding to the collection as if they were mending the torn fabric of time. “In Art as in science today knowledge and research are inseparable from ethics and ontology. The particular and the universal are in constant communication,” Cavalchini said. “The work of the Raqs Media Collective is rooted in this way of looking at and being in the world. They pay attention to every passing second as if it were an infinity, and the heightened attention they bring to bear on what the collection contains invites us to reconsider how we look at art itself. It is wonderful as a curator to be able to bring this thinking and sensibility to the museum’s collection and to our audiences.”

 

The second installation in the Special Exhibition Gallery is a silent, looped-digital projection that animates—through a series of subtle alterations—the many photographs and film stills the artists recorded while in residence at the Museum in 2010.  The images of the projected video reflect onto an adjacent gallery wall, where a luminous array of shiny metal surfaces mirroring distinct narratives, create a conversation between images in the mind of the viewer similar to what can happen while walking through the galleries of the Museum at night. During their flashlight tour in 2010, the Raqs Media Collective were struck by how faces, bodies, mythical beasts, birds, and monsters seemed to float and hover in the twilight of the dark museum. The objects that appeared anchored to provenance and meaning by day came alive during in darkness recombining themselves in all sorts of unusual ways.

 

Through their experience as Artists-in-Residence, the members of the Raqs Media Collective explore the way in which the Gardner Museum treats time, accumulates images in the mind of the viewer, curates a special experience of intelligence, and creates encounters between art and music. The exhibition will extend into a set of four 'exchanges' in Calderwood Hall each involving four speakers, with Raqs members as moderators. Each exchange will reflect on a theme which the Raqs Media Collective has chosen as a response to their time spent within the Gardner Museum. The themes refer to a specific attribute or quality that the Raqs Media Collective found in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and are meant to be interpreted freely by the speakers. Please see the full schedule of “Exchanges” below:

 

Thursday, September 20, 7pm            

Where does Nostalgia Take Us?

 

Thursday, October 25, 7pm            

What Does Intelligence Do for Us?

 

Saturday, November 3, 1pm            

What Does Accumulation Do to Us?

 

Saturday, December 8, 1pm            

Why Does Music Move Us?

 

In addition to their exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Raqs Media Collective will teach at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Their course intends to provide students with the unique opportunity to work closely with Raqs Media Collective. It will explore and activate lines of inquiry and tension between art, science, philosophy, history, urban theory, and other disciplines. The course also seeks to collapse the student-professor divide in the hopes of realizing the potentials of conducting vigorous research, art-making, and curation through participation and collaboration.

 

For more information about the Great Bare Mat & Constellation, Raqs Media Collective, or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum please visit www.gardnermuseum.org/about/press.

Raqs Media Collective

Formed in 1992, the Raqs Media Collective consists of independent media practitioners Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The group has been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces and events, locates them squarely along the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory - often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters.

Based in Delhi, their work engages with urban spaces and global circuits, persistently welding a sharp, edgily contemporary sense of what it means to lay claim to the world from the streets of Delhi. At the same time, Raqs Media Collective articulates an intimately living relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances. Raqs sees its work as opening out a series of investigations with image, sound, software, objects, performance, print, text and lately, curation, that straddles different (and changing) affective and aesthetic registers that express an imaginative unpacking of questions of identity and location, a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property.

In 2001 Raqs co-founded Sarai at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi where they coordinate media productions, pursue and administer independent research and practice projects and also work as members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series. For Raqs, Sarai is a space where they have the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary and hybrid contexts for creative work and to develop a sustained engagement with urban space and with different forms of media. They have had solo exhibitions at The Tate Britain and Frith Street Gallery in London; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Taipei, Liverpool, Ogaki and Venice Biennales, as well as curated "The Rest of Now" and co-curated "Scenarios" for Manifesta 7 (2008).

 

Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art

Prior to joining the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2001, Cavalchini served as a Special Advisor to Incontri Internazionali d’Arte in Rome (1988-1998) and as coordinator for the Concerti di Mezzogiorno, at the Festival of Two Worlds of Spoleto (1981-2001). Also in Spoleto, Cavalchini helped launch and organize the exhibition series “Arte Domani. Punti di Vista” (1990-1995). Cavalchini was the Italian Coordinator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art  Center, Long Island City,  for the exhibitions The Knot Arte Povera at P.S.1 (1985), Isamu Noguchi at the Venice Biennale (1986), and Michelangelo Pistoletto (1988). She also served as Project Director of Premio Malaparte for the Amici di Capri (1990-1997). As Special Advisor to Geneva-based Art for the World, her work included the traveling exhibition Playgrounds & Toys, which commemorated the 50^th anniversary of the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees. Cavalchini also curated Lo sguardo e l’ascolto (1994) at Spoleto’s Chiesa dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and co-curated Artist Collezionisti (2000) at Siena’s Palazzo delle Papesse.

 

 

 

 

 

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum •  280 The Fenway  Boston MA 02115  •  Entrance on Evans Way •  Hours: Wednesday through Monday, 11 am-5 pm and until 9 pm on Thursday •  Admission: Adults $15; Seniors $12; Students $5; Free for members, children under 18, everyone on his/her birthday, and all named “Isabella” •  $2 off admission with a same-day Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ticket • Info Line:  617.566.1401 •  Box Office: 617.278.5156  • www.gardnermuseum.org

 

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—a work of art in totality—is at once an intimate collection of fine and decorative art and a vibrant, innovative venue for contemporary artists, musicians and scholars. Housed in a 1902 building, modeled after a 15^th century Venetian palazzo, and a 2012 wing, designed by Renzo Piano, the Museum provides an unusual backdrop for the viewing of art. The Collection galleries installed in rooms surrounding the verdant Courtyard, contain more than 2,500 paintings, sculptures, tapestries, furniture, manuscripts, rare books and decorative arts featuring works by Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Manet, Degas, Whistler and Sargent. For more information on the new wing, please visit www.buildingproject.gardnermuseum.org. Also, visit the Gardner Museum online at www.gardnermuseum.org for more about special exhibitions, concerts, innovative arts education programs, and evening events.

 

Opening Sponsors • Opening year exhibitions are made possible in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Thursday evening programming is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. J.P. Morgan Private Bank is the opening year sponsor of Neighborhood Nights. Family and community programs are generously supported by the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, the Josephine and Louise Crane Foundation, the Caleb C. and Julia W. Dula Educational & Charitable Foundation, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Procter & Gamble Corporate Giving Fund, the Mabel Louise Riley Foundation, the Rowland Foundation, the William E. and Bertha E. Schrafft Charitable Trust, the State Street Foundation, and The Yawkey Foundation. The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Media Sponsor: Boston Globe Media, Inc.

 

 

 

Media Contact

Matt Montgomery Director of Marketing and Communications, 617 278 5184, mmontgomery@isgm.org

Michael A. Busack Media Relations Manager, 617 278 5107, mbusack@isgm.org

NOTE TO EDITORS Press Materials ▪ PDF copies of this press release and other press materials are available online at www.gardnermuseum.org/about/press. Images are available by request.