A review of the exhibition This is Unreal by RAQS Media Collective, Susanta Mandal and Yamini Nair at Experimenter, Calcutta 

Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by media practitioners Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. In their own declaration, their work engages with urban spaces and global circuits in their enquiry into the ways in which meaning is made. At their ongoing exhibition at Experimenter in Kolkata, Raqs has teamed up with Susanta Mandal and Yamini Nair to present 4 set-pieces, under the overarching title of This is Unreal. 

Raqs’ Skirmish, an installation of photographic image and decoupe text in acrylic is spread over 8 frames. Individually they are excerpts from a conversation. Together they thread into an unhappy short story about the decaying love of an estranged couple who are episodically giving out coded messages, crytallised within the variable replay of the ever-elusive image of the key. Skirmish is meant to be a multi-linear story stencilled on a canvas but its the impressionistic coinage, the economy of its wording that dominates the work. 

The other Raqs offering, a 3.22 minute ‘channel video and dialogue’ installation is called I did Not Hear From:The Measure of Anacoustic Reason is a vaguely disturbing work in which we see a video of a solitary pistoleer taking aim at his target at a shooting range. He is wearing the headphone, customary for shooting games. While the video is playing, the audience can pick up an actual headphone and listen to the dialogue, ostensibly the same dialogue that the man on screen, of whom we see just from the back, is listening to. Inside the headphone, a woman talks in a sad, deep voice about distant afternoons she had spent waiting for her man. But the man continues to shoot somewhat aimlessly. Breakdown of communication would be the most common interpretation of this piece, though the work clearly plays with more complex ideas of absence, void, vision and even the boredom of recurring manhood, expressed in the act of shooting; manhood, that is not only incapable of yearning but also unable to appreciate the same. 

Susanta Mandal’s untitled installation makes perhaps the loudest comment. The work shows a mechanical contraption, an amalgam of small ‘industrial’ gadgets brought together on one side of white cloth on whose another side we see the reflection of the same contraption. But the reflected image creates a stark and primitive image that has no apparent link to the contraption on the other side. Mandal seems to be toying with identity and its larger reflections and even on the nature of pre and post-industrial economy. 

Yamini Nayar’s work startles only when it is learnt to have been created on a tabletop, because the effect subverts any clue about the actual dimensions and significance of shape, form and structure. The larger than life effect of her three C-type works, Pursuit and Untitled (Between the lines) and Speaking Room are hence illusory and this is where lies her message.