Project 88 is delighted to announce Raqs Media Collective's solo exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, curated by Dieter
Roelstraete.
8 May - 11 July 2025
University of Chicago, IL, United States
Cavalcade zooms in on a gathering as a moment where humans and what is imagined to be "extra-human" or "more than human" jostle for space.
A congregation of illogical figurations embodying asynchronous forms of time-leakage stand outside histories and chronologies. This cavalcade emanates from dreams, myths, and speculations, posing the question of what it might mean to extend human solidarity to forms of animal, mythic, and machinic sentience, to venture with them into the realm of the unknown.
Moving through forests, standing at the edges of coal mine craters, climbing the upthrust of petrified lava from pre-historic volcanic eruptions, flying over brick kilns and dry river beds, observing ships waiting at sea, and walking with a nocturnal procession of devotees turning into ghosts, goblins, guardian spirits to celebrate the nuptials of the Indic deities Shiva and Parvati, Cavalcade expands our understanding of what it means to inhabit the cosmos, to be cosmopolitan.
The film is annotated by three print enigmas that condense the queries that germinated during its making, into readable images. These images, which might as well be diagrams of Raqs’ thought processes, draw on connections forged between the artists’ triggers and prompts to each other, and to responses harvested from AI agents. They admit to the intrusion of an unexpected instantiation into the cosmos of the exhibition.
Prompts provoke propositions into the thinkable and unthinkable, forming a cosmopolitan carnival, a cosmotechnical investigation, a cosmonautical exercise.
Cavalcade is Raqs Media Collective’s reckoning with this moment and with every moment to come from now on. It is their testing of the waters of time.
