Raqs Media Collective

I spent five days looking at pictures that the photographers had brought with them, and sometimes showing images from Raqs work in a small room at the Goethe Institute. I was there with Gauri Gill, a photographer from Delhi, who also featured in an early Raqs film, 'Present Imperfect, Future Tense'. This was a short film about two young people who made pictures of other young people in Delhi. Showing the film (and seeing it) after many years (we made it more than twelve years ago) was part nostalgia, part surprise at seeing how some ways of thinking about space, and people have stayed with us for all these years. I could recognize the impatience and discomfort with a single screen. This little film is an argument for a plenitude of screens.

Talking about images of Delhi in Kabul was a strange experience, we were surrounded by ruins, and the strange sense of what the city might have once been. Walking around, one felt occasionally confronted by the ghost of a building. So, like the 'missing person' there might even be a way of talking about the 'missing building'

Here are two pictures from Kabul, one of the ruined, Darul Aman Palace (which could be a part of a trajectory that began with ruined aeroplanes in 'There Has been a Change of Plan' and another - a view of a hillside (with the kind of houses that the majority of Kabul lives in).

View of Darul Aman Palace

A View of Kabul from TV Hill