IKON, Raqs Media Collective

Outset was delighted to support "When The Scales Fall From Your Eyes", an exhibition by Raqs Media Collective at Ikon Eastside, Birmingham. This was the collective’s first exhibition in a public space in the UK.

Raqs Media Collective – Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta – are artists based in New Delhi. They make work that ‘locates them at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory’.

For Ikon’s Eastside programme, Raqs created "When the Scales Fall From Your Eyes", an ambitious installation that is at once visually arresting and intriguing through complex symbolism. It suggests a ritual for some contemporary cult, obsessed with weights and measures (and measurement in general) as keys to the mysteries and purposes of existence. The burden of calculation that all of us carry today has its own codes and conventions. The ubiquity of measuring devices (scales, rulers and meters of all kinds) on the surface of everyday life and the proliferation of indicators of quanta of different categories – pleasure, liberty, health, happiness, energy and potency – which pepper our discourse, suggest that we need to reflect on how much we value ‘muchness’ for its own sake.

"When the Scales Fall From Your Eyes" was devised to encourage a contemplative practice of considering ‘muchness’. The relative weights of things, desires, dreams, obsessions and habits are arranged to add up to a wide spectrum of man-made items. The promise and dystopia of relentless measurement, the fantasy of controlling life by owning things and the melancholia of empty illumination, all figured in this challenging project.