On Raqs Media Collective

In the dark, low-ceilinged interior of a seventeenth-century kitchen glows a red clock. Part of Raqs Media Collective’s first solo exhibition in twelve years in their native India, “The Time is Never Ripe” at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation, the video projection Blood Moon (2025) evokes the cycles of multiple timelines and the tropes of folklore: fertility synced with the moon, stories told at the hearth, the moon’s transit in the earth’s shadow. Bringing together works that span the past fifteen years, the show combines these characteristic themes with a response to Ladakh’s setting on India’s northern edge, bordering Pakistan and China. It is currently embroiled in a movement for statehood that would restore elected self-governance, suspended since India’s controversial 2019 abrogation of the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, the territory of which Ladakh was formerly a part. Its rugged land and deeply layered past, including a period as a Silk Route stop, make it an unusual and yet appropriate site for Raqs’s work.