A pitch-black clock, The Ecliptic, 2014, holds pride of place in Raqs Media Collective’s current exhibition, “Corrections to the First Draft of History.” Replacing numbers, one half of the clock bears the word TIME, while on the other half, the words FREE, FOLD, FIGURE, FUN, FIX, and FREEZE alternatingly light up. The alliteration provides rhythm and a sense of repetition but also brings to mind the F-word: future. Subjected to a relationship with the noun TIME, the verbs are rendered inactive, becoming adjectives, as if the future will watch the futility of our grasping for a voice or light, elided and eclipsed.

On the opposite wall is Corrections to the First Draft of History (Redraft 1), 2014, a series of nineteen framed newspaper pages, some of which have been erased with chalkboard paint and overwritten with epigrams in chalk. These debate the distortions of history, the primacy of the journalist’s pen, and the fiction of finance (as seen by a drawing of a donkey on the stock-market pages). They are indeterminate, creating a rift in both time and meaning, so much so that it is the pristine composition of the frames in space and less the content of the markings that leaves the viewer taut between the past and future. It is the form that we must extract from the formidable.

Though the show verges on being too spare, it is in this lacuna, in the silence before (or after) language (or emotion), in which one could arguably occupy a viewer for a few minutes and a few months alike.

— Himali Singh Soin