What Art have I seen?
RAQS Media Collective at the Frith Street Gallery in Golden Square
The gallery as a trading floor for evoking human experience. A series of clocks correlated with places (New York, Lagos, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, etc.), the faces modified by changing the numerals for emotions (epiphany, anxiety, duty, guilt, indifference, awe, fatigue, nostalgia, ecstasy, fear, panic, remorse). So the ‘time’ in Kabul: the hour is between panic and remorse and the minute at anxiety. In amongst the real locations are some imagined ones, Macondo (the town in Marquez fictions), Shangri La, etc.) Here the clocks go backwards.
In the middle of the room circling (on four screens) around a pillar is a face, still in the context of a global emotional roller-coaster. The sounds are an inscrutable background.
Anne Douglas, some time ago, introduced me to the Rasas, an aesthetic structure of emotional expressions (love, mirth, sorrow, anger, energy, terror, disgust, astonishment) for theatre in traditional Indian culture.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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