This screening is part of a series of discursive and performative events Recompositions, accompanying the exhibition ‘The place we do not know is the place we are looking for’, curated by Laura McLean and Suvani Suri.

Featuring works by Priyanka Chhabra and Raqs Media Collective

Amplifying the mode of the gathering, the program assembles and attends to resonant practices that are intent on inventing languages to be able to hold ineffable dreams, desires and encounters, unfixed from the discretisation of time, bodies, and sensing.

The juxtaposition of these film works is underscored by a curatorial interest in the attempts to stage and read specific historical disjunctures, in forms that often cascade between documentary sources, archival fictions and speculative détournements. By bringing these films together, we imagine the works conversing with each other, in a vein that carries both a lightness of approach and intensity of thought contending with the ideas in the exhibition.

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒘𝒆 𝒅𝒐 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒌𝒏𝒐𝒘 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒘𝒆 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒇𝒐𝒓 unfolds across two sites in @collingwood_yards: West Space (1 Feb → 29 March) and @liquid_architecture (1 → 22 Feb) alongside a series of programs Recompositions with the participating artists from 17 → 23 February. Presented by @liquid_architecture, @sarai.csds @westspace, supported by Centre for Australia-India Relations Maitri Cultural Partnerships Program.

Iqraar-naama (The Agreement)

Film by Priyanka Chhabra, 2022

Duration: 55mins

Language: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi

Supported by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), 2022

In the grand narrative of the Partition of Punjab in 1947,  Iqraar-naama is a film about the 'refugee', 'migrant', 'displaced person' as the protagonist of his own story. Told through a collection of documents from the personal archive of Charandas Bangia, a Partition refugee from Lyallpur, Pakistan who finally settled in Amritsar, India. The documents preserved carefully for over 90 years set the stage for history to unfold. The film decenters historical narratives from the state to the citizen, from state archives to personal archive, looking at history from the perspective of those who experience it. Using documents, photographs, drawings, text and interviews, the film hangs on a series of dialogues between the state, citizen, allotment officers, ministry of relief and rehabilitation and other such sundry characters encountered in the history of the Partition of Punjab (1947).

Priyanka lives and works out of Delhi, as an artist, film director and editor exploring notions of home, memory, landscape and relationships of people to places. She articulates her practice as an archaeology of silences, digging at sites characterised by trauma; physical and emotional. Since 2017 her work has focussed on reconciling memories and experiences of the Partition of Punjab (1947) through a trilogy of works - Rock Paper Scissors (2024), Iqraar-naama (The Agreement, 2022) and Pichla Varka (The Previous Page, 2019).

The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone

Chronogram / film by Raqs Media Collective, 2023

Duration: 25:05 minutes

Commissioned by Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, United Kingdom (2023)

The Bicyclist who fell into a Time Cone oscillates between fact and fiction while hovering over the year 1980. It was a crepuscular time. A time of thresholds and transience. The memory of a bicyclist, sitting still, holding on to the handlebars, watching an aeroplane spiral down from the sky over Delhi to a crash, remains vivid. The descent of that aircraft was a turn in time, a move along a spiral, a bracket opening and closing like a pause between years of tumult and upheaval. This bracket, this pause, left a significant mark on our collective imaginaries, even though it also felt as if nothing much happened that year.

As a year that didn’t quite break the headlines, it was also the year in which a different visual and optical sensibility, tied to the increasing presence of the video image and its slight ‘parallax’ began to make itself visible. That slight but significant sensory disjunction, the mis-registrations of the new video image, also marks the sensation of watching time simultaneously stand still and spiral out of control. ‘The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Parallax Time Cone’ is an investigation into the optics of this strange and specific sensation of time, which has become second nature since 1980. It is a time traveling search, aboard an imagined and remembered bicycle. pedaling into that pause between turbulences, that lurks in every year. It’s as if there was/is a 1980, hidden, in every year.

Shot in New Delhi’s hinterland, places of wilderness in-between and at the edge of other places, it sees Raqs Media Collective experiment with new visual textures achieved through nesting, embedding, and juxtaposing contemporary footage with found archival images, some of which have been sourced from Jencks travels in India in the 1980s. This polyphony of visual registers is accompanied by a single voice narration; a monologue about time, memory, and history that lapses between scales of temporality and implies a spectral plurality of time. The film’s main protagonist is the figure of the bicyclist whose circular and repetitive journey invokes an explorative and meditative mood. Using temporal and geographical zooms, shifts and overlays a contemplative landscape is created, at once personal and public.

Raqs Media Collective (* 1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) finds itself at the nexus of contemporary art, historical enquiry, and philosophical speculation. In several languages, the word “raqs” denotes a state of revolution, whirling and turning into an intensified state of awareness. They interpret it as ‘kinetic contemplation’- a restless and energetic entanglement with the world and time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation.