Raqs Media Collective

The Museum of Lost Constellations is a work created especially for Art of Memory and The Observatory Museum. Long before astronomy became a profession, any astronomer could identify and name a constellation, with the outcome that every celestial map looked different from the next. Eventually, in 1930 the International Astronomical Union designated 88 official constellations. Many of the constellations consequently ‘disappeared’ (the stars themselves of course remained), and stars returned to being individual stars rather than compound, named images. In The Museum of Lost Constellations we encounter objects representing these ancient constellations intermingled with The Observatory Museum’s permanent collection. The Reindeer, The Flamingo, The Tigris River, The Tortoise, amongst others– memories of the images the heavens once bore.

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 in New Delhi, India, by Jeebesh Bagchi (1965), Monica Narula (1969) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (1969). Raqs Media Collective enjoy playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. In their work, they move freely between sound, image, video, text, object, gesture, in a series of investigations that revolve around questions of time and space, expressing a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a calm but consistent critique of power and ownership. Equally poetic and analytical, a Raqs work can be strikingly simple in its appearance and execution and yet be driven by an immense complexity of motives.