Collaboration | Sound Installation | Raqs Media Collective | ISh S | diFfuSed beats | Frith Street Gallery | London | 31 Jan – 16 March 2019 |
Collaboration | Sound Installation | Raqs Media Collective | ISh S | diFfuSed beats | Frith Street Gallery |
6 Channel Sound Installation by Ish S for an immersive Installation called Spinal by Raqs Media Collective
Additional Composition by diFfuSed beats
Sound Spatalisation and Post Production at Sound Reasons
Exhibit Open from
31 January 2019 – 16 March 2019
Frith Street Gallery
17-18 Golden Square
London W1F 9JJ
Spinal follows on from Raqs’ immersive installation Not Yet At Ease, co-commissioned by Firstsite and 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts programme for the First World War centenary.
Invoking transcripts of letters and diaries, close readings of medical records and official dispatches, extracts from novels and poetry, accounts of dreams and nightmares, fragments of archival film & photography and spectral snatches of voices captured in hundred-year-old sound recordings, Raqs foreground the experiences and testimonies of the soldiers and followers from the Indian Subcontinent who saw action in the First World War.
Spinal invents a dreamscape to build a lyrical and imaginative layer of reflection. It discovers and highlights the official discomfiture with what was taken to be an ‘excess of poetry’ (read as a sign of ‘mental disquietude’) in the soldier’s accounts. Raqs consider this early admission and evasion of the psychological distress produced by war to assert that the ‘unease’ generated by the First World War has not yet ceased.
