Mystified about the clocks that have suddenly sprung up on billboards all over the capital?
They are part of a public art project titled “Meanwhile Elsewhere” by the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation for the 2014 Dhaka Art Summit.
“This is their largest public art project to date,” said Nadia Samdani, the Founder and Director of Dhaka Art Summit.
Competed yesterday, the project covered ten billboards and 150 roadside signs with the image of a clock – but contrary to traditional clocks, these show Bangla words instead of numbers, representing a subjective interpretation of time.
The billboards feature clocks whose minute-hands show one word and the hour-hand another. These words or phrases complement each other, hinting towards a deeper meaning. When all the billboards are seen collectively, it is meant to reveal a combination of different states of mind and being during different times of the day, crafted into a poem.
The final piece is the “Crazy Clock” video installation, to be unveiled at the Dhaka Art Summit. The hands will spin around pause on a “crazy” message, Nadia said.
The Summit will be taking over the four floors of the Shilpakala Academy from February 7-9. Billed as the world’s largest South Asian art event, the Dhaka Art Summit will highlight the region’s contemporary art scene.
The concept behind the clocks is to examine the way we look at billboards, and “subjective experience of time and duration,” the artists said.
Research suggests that reading words on walls or commercial signposts can create a strong effect on the subconscious. It captures the readers’ moments between awareness and unawareness after reading certain words. Despite being present in the situation, our minds can wander off somewhere else. Hence, the project title.
“Meanwhile Elsewhere” is part of the Untimely series, one of Raqs Media Collective’s experiments with time and the “metaphorical possibilities” of time.
Other installations of the series have been exhibited around the world.
In Birmingham, UK, in 2012, Raqs Media Collective did a similar installation of clocks billboards with English words, called: “Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat,” as part of the 48 Sheets project.
The first of such clocks by the Raqs were seen in Emoção Art.ficial Exhibition, Itaú Cultural Centre, Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2002.
The theme there has remained the same for this installation in Dhaka: to nudge our mental state of being or feeling with words, representing emotions we contemporaneously feel within: epiphany, panic, remorse, nostalgia, fear, ecstasy, awe, fatigue, guilt, indifference, anxiety.
Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who designed the project, are practitioners of contemporary art and through Raqs Media Collective. They have participated in many major international shows, including The European Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2008.
Diana Campbell Betancourt, artistic director of Samdani Art Foundation, is curator of the initiative.
