The Great Bare Mat & Constellation (projection still). Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, 2012.
WHERE: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
WHEN: Goes on view Thursday, September 20, 2012 through January 7, 2013.
TITLE: The Great Bare Mat & Constellation
BRIEF ABOUT: The Raqs Media Collective (www.raqsmediacollective.net) (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), created two distinct installations in the special exhibition galleries. The “Great Bare Mat & Constellation” refers to a carpet, a surface for the staging of conversations, displayed at the foot of The Vinegar Tasters, a two-part 17th century Japanese screen from the Museum’s Collection. The carpet’s repeated motif, woven by a group of expert Bulgarian weavers, indexes the constellation of the Ursa Major (The Great Bear) against a background drawing that traces the exchanges between the three personal computers of the Raqs Media Collective and the world during one hour’s time.
Raqs members view time as a measure of change and are interested in thinking about how our sense of time as human beings has accelerated, fragmented and intensified in this century. The intense criss-crossing patterns of the carpet demonstrate the intricacy, complexity and global quality of contemporary communication set against the ancient and leisurely nightly pass time of star gazing.
