Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective | Bill of Lading

Curators: Nirith Nelson, Rotem Ruff
May 11, 2013 - Aug 3, 2013

Jeebesh Bagchi born in 1965; Monica Narula born in 1969; Shuddhabrata Sengupta born in 1968, All live and work in New Delhi

Bloom, 2013, video, 2:30 minutes

During Raqs’ visit to the Dead Sea, it was the supersonic booms of a squadron of jets circling overhead that set in motion a creative process revolving around the meaning of salt in various cultural and historical contexts and as a philosophical and metaphysical metaphor. The key concept in this study is the notion of sediment in its metaphorical sense as denoting cultural and linguistic stratification. So, for example, salt appears in such linguistic expressions as “the salt of the earth” and the biblical “salt covenant”, or the Hindi expression Namak Haram (“disloyal to salt”), denoting an untrustworthy person. As a valuable mineral, salt carried crucial significance in economic and geographical networks up to the modern age, and therefore also symbolic significance – for instance, in Gandhi’s Salt March.

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