Bill of Lading is a joint exhibition of Raqs Media Collective, based in New Delhi, and the Israeli artist Nevet Yitzhak. It is the outcome of concurrent 2011 residencies spent by the artists in Israel, at the JCVA residency, and India, in the KHOJ residency program, respectively.
The works of Raqs Media Collective and those of Nevet Yitzhak explore questions of social and political time and space as expressed in societies that are attempting to rebuilt and redefine their identities. Both use archival material and popular culture as the raw materials that allow them to study, observe, and offer a renewed understanding of historical, personal, and national narratives and to raise questions concerning the role of art in an information- and image-saturated era. Both work primarily with video, but despite their affinities, their approaches to the medium can be described as antithetical: whereas Raqs’ video works create the effect of a journey that expands the boundaries of language and of the imagination by means of basic metaphors, such as the body or the city, Yitzhak focuses on a deconstruction of particular units of meaning into their constituent parts – on a visual, temporal, and auditory level – while treating the medium of video as a tool that allows her to subvert conventional cultural and conceptual schemes.
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Raqs Media Collective is a New Delhi-based group of artists that has been receiving international acclaim and recognition. Members of the group participated in major international shows, including Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002) and the Venice Biennale (2003), and were co-curators of Manifesta 7 (2008). Their work Bloom was created for this show following a visit to the Dead Sea and their ongoing exploration of the cultural and social connotations of salt. Alongside it presented the works The Capital of Accumulation a video inspired by the figure of Rosa Luxemburg, and More Salt in Your Tears features an image of the Baltic Sea whose salt content is lower than that of human tears.
Nevet Yitzhak has shown widely in Israel and abroad and is the recipient of the Creative Encouragement Award, Israel Ministry of Culture & Sport in 2012. The Concert, her video and sound installation featured here, examines the meaning of commerce and artifacts in the post-colonial West and the image of the “Orient” that is reflected therein. The work explores cultural and geographical conceptions of East and West and undermines the conventional understanding of these terms.
The exhibition is an initiative of the JCVA residency program
In collaboration with:
משרד החוץ
אגף קשרי תרבות ומדע
ISRAEL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
DIVISION FOR CULTURAL & SCIENTIFIC AFFAIRS
KHOJ International Artists Association, New Delhi
The work of Nevet Yitzhak supported by:
Outset Israel
The Shmuel Givon Prize
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