Jeebesh Bagchi, * 1965; Monica Narula, * 1969; Shuddhabrata Sengupta, * 1968; live and work in New Delhi (IN)

Escapement, 2009

The artist group Raqs Media Collective has been based in New Delhi since 1992. The collective cofounded the research platform Sarai in 2001. Based on their experience as documentary filmmakers, today, the three artists work with various media ranging from photography, installation, video, performance, and image-text collages, while also pursuing curatorial questions. A further subject the artists treat in many of their works is the impact on the perception of time and contemporaneity made by information technologies in the digital age, whereby time and space apparently converge.
The installation Escapement consists of twenty-seven clocks representing cities in different time zones, thus creating a map of the world. Three of the clocks signify fictitious cities, such as Macondo or Babel. Instead of indicating the usual numbers, the clocks’ hands point to words such as epiphany, anxiety, guilt, fatigue, fear – words referring to complex emotional states of being that are the same for all regardless of geographic or temporal location. The installation’s effect is reinforced by the sound of heartbeats, other familiar noises of everyday communication, and a video of the expressionless face of a young person.
Escapement is an English term for the mechanism in a clock that controls the passage of time and the progression of seconds. The word connotes both the “escaping” or fleeting movement of time and refers to time’s measurement. The invention of the clock has intensified the interval between “now” and “before.” At the same time, we live within a grid comprising different degrees of longitude and latitude according to which world time is measured. But even though the clocks show the same time merely because they are located at the same longitude, as are London and Lagos, this does not mean that people in these cities have the same sense of time. On the contrary, we are “contemporaries of different times and spaces.” Therefore, “we are also in a state of permanent jetlag, which makes us slightly out of breath and fall out of time. Contemporaneity harbors the simultaneity of very different ways of life.” (AMB)

Escapement, 2009