raqs.

Raqs Media Collective names a three-person authorship — Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta — that has functioned since 1992 as both a contemporary-art practice and a piece of cultural infrastructure. Trained as documentary filmmakers at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre in Jamia Millia Islamia, the trio incorporated themselves almost by accident, as a legal condition of a Channel 4 grant, and then made the accident programmatic: everything after is signed collectively, with no individual credits parsed out, no founder cult, and no single medium as home base.

Raqs is at once a working artist studio producing video, sculpture, installation, photography and text for Documenta 11 (2002), Venice (2015's Coronation Park), Manifesta 7 (2008) and the Shanghai Biennale (which they curated in 2016–17 under the title Why Not Ask Again?), and the initiating force behind Sarai, the interdisciplinary media-and-urbanism research program they co-founded in 2000–2001 at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Sarai's published “Readers” and open fellowship structure turned a small collective into the anchor of a much larger Delhi-based milieu — new-media researchers, free-software programmers, urban ethnographers and independent publishers — through roughly 2012.

The name itself does the collective's characteristic double work: “raqs” is the whirling dervish's ecstatic focus, glossed by the group as “kinetic contemplation,” and simultaneously a backronym for “Rarely Asked Questions” — a wink that captures how seriously the group takes play, ambiguity and the productive misreading of its own archive.