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Raqs Media Collective: The Equation Makers

Delhi, India–based artists Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta—better known as Raqs Media Collective—have gained a wide international following over the past decade for works that deal in the poetics, and often the paradoxes, of everyday life, from the ambiguities of keeping time to the social flux of urban realities. For their latest exhibition, “Surjection,” currently on view at the Art Gallery of York University, the trio weaves advanced mathematical theory with resilient post-colonial legacies in a sprawling multimedia installation that takes a cautionary measure of modern identity. Canadian Art’s Bryne McLaughlin caught up with Sengupta during the exhibition installation last week to talk about the show.

Bryne McLaughlin: The exhibition at the AGYU is titled “Surjection,” which, as I understand it, is the term for a mathematical concept that deals with the transfer of the elements of one set into the features of another. It’s a question of fluctuating identity, in a way. Could you tell me how the three of you came to this concept of surjection?

Shuddhabrata Sengupta: There are several points of interest that led to surjection. First of all, we were very aware of the structure of the two distinct gallery spaces. It demands that you think about a relationship between two enclosures, and we’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of how things leak in from one set of enclosures to another set of enclosures. An important idea in our work previously has been seepage, or how one thing moves from one surface to another surface. Surjection is a simple mathematical principle that we all engage in primary school when we match the contents of one set to the contents of another set.

BM: As a process of establishing relations?

SS: Establishing relations, establishing connectivity between different kinds of ideas. It’s also a relationship of transposing from one register to another register. I think as a collective that’s something we do a lot of the time. We’re constantly establishing relationships between the ideas and concepts that each of us carries in our minds. We have to make estimates and guesses about the matches between what’s going on in my head and what’s going on in Jeebesh’s head or in Monica’s head. We try to create these lines of connection, first between ourselves and then between what’s going on within ourselves and in the rest of the world. Surjection is a term that was first introduced into mathematical vocabulary by a collective called the Bourbaki group, which published under the name Nicolas Bourbaki.

BM: It’s a pseudonym, right?

SS: Yes. Because we work as a collective, we’ve always found this personality of the Bourbaki ensemble quite interesting. They were very ambitious and they wanted to rewrite the foundations of mathematics in the 20th century. They’ve been quite influential in many ways. So we’ve tried to understand some of the things they did over the decades that they were active. Surjection is part of their vocabulary and one understands it very simply as something that is not dissimilar to, but is distinct from, projection. When you project, you throw material, in a sense, from a source onto a surface. Surjection presumes a relationship between materials that are distributed already. It could be the relationship between thought and image, between speech and gesture. There are many elements in this show that have to do with signage, with signs and words and how things stand in for each other.

The other thing, of course, is the sound of the word “surge.” What does it mean for things to surge within and through us? One of our persistent concerns has been the difficulty of, or the impossibility of, counting or measuring an upheaval. It could be an upheaval in the street, like what’s happened in the Middle East; it could be an upheaval of an emotional character within a person’s life; it could be waves of events, and so on.

BM: Like unpredictable phenomena that take on their own momentum?

SS: Exactly. They take on their own dynamics, they take on their own momentum. But I think there is this kind of persistent attempt to reduce them to a set of metrics, which fails, inevitably. The ambition to transform the surge into a metric is also in some ways a ruling ambition to transform populations into numbers, to transform people into data, to transform things into tangible entities that can be counted.

Raqs Media Collective “Surjection” installation view with (right) The Untold Intimacy of Digits 2011 / photo Cheryl O'Brien

BM: So it’s a contradiction between measurable and immeasurable effect?

SS: Yes, and if one were to think of surjection as the mathematical relationship between quantities and qualities, how do you transpose qualities into quantities? In a roundabout way, that’s the relationship between the two poles of the show.

BM: Is there an indeterminate point in the work where the question of connections is ultimately left open?

SS: I think it’s left open. We do scatter certain clues. Every exhibition of ours is like the scene of a crime, and you can always make things up as you go along. But if you don’t, it’s fine. I don’t think that the experience of looking at the work depends entirely on being able to piece a theoretical architecture of the work or the show. It’s perfectly okay to just stand and stare at a counting hand.

BM: The exhibition opens with a light-box work in which the phrase “emotions surge but do not count” is lit in different combinations of words and, in turn, meanings. Can you speak a bit about this and how it sets up the rest of the exhibition?

SS: There are stories that connect all of the works in the show. The first thing you see is this proverb—we call it Proverb #6. We have been doing this series of epigrammatic, proverb-like statements where the balance or the meaning of what is said changes with every iteration of how it’s read, which changes through the mechanism of light that changes the pattern. So in one instance, it’s “emotions surge but do not count,” but it can also be read as “emotions surge but do count” or “emotions count but do not surge”. Is it about significance or measure? Do I “count” as a person? Or am I being “counted”? This sets in place these clues about surges, about feelings and about counting, which then are unravelled through the show.

BM: That idea of counting also seems to figure in another work in the show—an animated projection of a hand that is motioning or counting.

SS: There is a lot here to do with hands and gestures. This work is actually the treatment of an archival trace. That actual handprint was taken in 1858 from a peasant in Bengal by the district collector of that region named William Herschel, who himself is a kind of interesting character. As the history goes, Herschel then sent the handprint to Francis Galton, who was quite a remarkable sort of eugenicist, propagandist, conservative public intellectual in 19th-century England. He was obsessed about measures of people and trying to do these indexes of beauty, indexes of truthfulness, all that kind of stuff. He was interested in trying to pin down individual identity and the question of identity. The handprint was used as the authenticating trace on a legal document. There was this idea that the natives never speak the truth, so how do you hold a man to his word if the signature changes? It’s by the handprint. And this specific handprint becomes the kind of ancestor of all efforts to produce fingerprinting technologies.

BM: Is this something that was specific to the British Raj, or was it practiced by colonial authorities everywhere?

SS: Well, the question of trying to pin a trace on the body of identity was in the air. Various people tried to do various things, nasal indexes and so on. But none of these are reliable. It’s actually ultimately the fingerprint that becomes reliable. But because the Raj in India was such a massive laboratory of available bodies, these experiments could be done at a greater scale and faster than anywhere else. So in a sense, a lot of this stuff came out of that encounter between the imperatives of administration and a huge population. Galton got interested in this idea and a lot of things went back and forth between London and Calcutta. And finally the protocols for fingerprinting were developed by the Calcutta Police and then applied everywhere else in the world. It’s all coming back with biometrics, the iris scan and the fingerprint as a digital trace.

The work is titled The Untold Intimacy of Digits. And there’s a little secret to that title, which resolves as UID. UID is the name for a massive Government of India scheme—called the Unique Identification Database—to produce a biometric database for the entire population. It’s the Galton dream revisited in the 21st century. It will be the largest biometric database in the world. I’m not sure it’s going to work, and I hope it doesn’t work, but this is a kind of advance memorial to the possible hope for the demise of that. What the hand does is, basically, count to infinity. It’s always counting. We’ve been very interested in this idea of counting to infinity. Infinity is a quality without measure, in a sense, and the idea that you can count a population to its infinite boundary is in some ways a paradox.

So the hand is counting, it’s beckoning, and this is also the gesture for fearlessness; you have nothing to fear, because it’s the open hand. The open hand shows you’re not concealing anything. Sometimes it even looks like a crab. There’s also this notion of being able to tell a person’s fortune by looking at their palm. So there are all sorts of things to do with the hand and gesture.

BM: Gestures have many different cultural significations. A gesture in one culture can mean a different thing in another culture. Does that figure here?

SS: There’s more than a hint of it. Another work, Rewriting on the Wall, is this kind of luminous array of shiny metal hands mounted on the wall. It’s actually a very short text that we’ve written and has been translated into American Sign Language. It’s the language that is used when you have to work with silence. We’ve been quite interested with the limits of speech and what can you say with silence. And it seems to us one of the simplest things you can say is that the language of silence is the language of signing. So the text that this translates is a clumsy little fragment about the relationship between the words “I” and “we”—essentially the relationship that has to do with the calibration of a horizon of yourself. There’s a different calibration when you’re an “I” and when you’re a “we.”

Raqs Media Collective An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale 2011 Installation view / photo Cheryl O'Brien

BM: You mentioned earlier the importance of responding to the divided gallery space. Among the works installed in the back gallery is a large-scale projection that shows what looks to be an office space in the colonial era. What’s the story behind this?

SS: This projection is titled An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale. So it’s about a trace of an event that doesn’t get registered. This is based on a photograph taken in a surveyor’s office in 19th century Calcutta, around the time that the handprint in the first gallery has been taken. The people who are actually administering the creation of information about that population would be sitting in offices like these, taking notes and making maps, which is what you see people doing here.

But things then begin to happen to the photograph. Everything changes: it goes from darkness to light; the colours on the shirts change to a kind of strange indigo tint; there are these bottles that change colour; and the loop begins again in darkness with this kind of constellation of lights showing. A figure appears in the window who seems to be climbing up some sort of hill and seems to be from our time. He disappears in the distance.

So some journeys are being made in the picture. I think what’s really nice about this image installed here is that it makes you feel as though you are in the room because of the scale and size of the projection. It’s great to be working with these volumes. So when we were thinking about this particular space in the gallery, we wanted the wall to suggest that inhabitation. A lot of things happen, but it’s as if they don’t. So it’s again these little subtle changes, transformations that perhaps defeat the idea of measure. It’s nice to set that little story in a photograph that documents an office devoted to measure, I think.

BM: In this exhibition and in other works that you’ve done, there seems to be an underlying narrative that is unique to a certain Indian experience. Yet your work is often critically framed in a global context. How important is that? It’s clear that this work is not necessarily about India, or Calcutta, or the British Raj, but for an audience here or elsewhere, how do you find that particular relationship is transmitted or translated?

SS: Perhaps it is important as an anchor, but not as a transport. It may have a very specific location in history, but that’s its point of anchor. The work has to sail, and sailing requires the lifting of the anchor in a way.

My answer to this question is always when we read or try to understand or immerse ourselves in things that come from elsewhere, we obviously read in terms of how those things signify to us. When I’m reading Margaret Atwood, I’m not necessarily reading a Canadian author, I’m reading someone who writes about human experience knowing fully well that that is anchored in a certain specific location where she comes from. But there seems to be an acceptance of a default, of the universal character of certain products of human culture. If we take that to be the case, then we can argue that that default universal should apply across all longitudes. Enough is going on at the same time in Canada or the northern United States to do with the measurement of human population for this to be a work specifically about the experience of the British Raj.

So if, by looking at this, you are provoked to think about what is my own or what is a general history here and throughout the world, it’s not actually specific to any particular region. It seems to be a property of the time rather than a property of a place, and that time has in some ways returned through concerns with measurement and identification being again with us. It might be interesting to think of it that way.

BM: So, in a way, this returns to the idea of surjection—of one set of understanding transferred to another?

SS: There is a relationship, but there is also the possibility of taxonomy. We come from that part of the world, we live in that part of the world, and we want to live in that part of the world. The ideas in this show have as much to do with 20th-century mathematics as they have to do with the legacies of colonial rule. Ways of thinking about populations are present even in the modern republican context. So the answer is yes and no—I mean both.

Raqs Media Collective (from left: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2009 / photo Martin Waelde, Goethe Institute Warsaw

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