Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Film

Raqs Media Collective’s The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone approaches the histories of the year 1980 from multiple vantage points. The Raqs Media Collective—established in 1992 by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and named after a word that in Urdu, Persian, and Arabic refers to a state of awareness achieved through spinning whirling dervishes enter when they whirl—has focused their practice on examining how we come to understand history and time. They have described 1980 as a transitional year—one in which not much happened, but everything changed. In The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone, they explore this sense of historical transition using parallax, the perceived shift in an object’s position as the observer changes their viewpoint, to confront the viewer with a mix of fact and fiction. Alternating between analog video and the digital present, the film combines shots of a bicyclist—the video’s key motif—circling around the fringes of New Delhi, landscape imagery with superimposed drawings, and a compilation of archival video and photographic records of urban and architectural subjects, underscoring the challenges of capturing and narrating the fleeting, shifting past.