Time Flowers
Desire Seeds from the series Dohas for Doha, 2019, text, image, illumination, 4 mins
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Still from moving image.
Raqs Media Collective’s video series Dohas for Doha are illuminated proverbs that play with linguistics, light, and the transmission of knowledge. A doha is a poetic form that consists of four lines, a technique popularised by the medieval Hindi poet and mystic Kabir. Changes to the sequences of words in these phrases creates multiple meanings and puns that refer to the city of Doha in encoded messages, providing another layer to the word doha, which in Hindi means ‘double’.
Time Flowers, Desire Seeds’s particular aphorism explores the idea that time is the result of each moment’s desire to continue on to the next. Here, language combines with spectrographic analysis of a photographic image in what appears as an attempt to hold onto a constantly changing thought.
From their base in Dehli, the collective comment that, ‘at life’s edge, which we face often nowadays in a city starved of oxygen, each moment’s inhalation represents a desire to flower in a hopefully continuing breath’.
Dohas woven by Kabir,
Rahim sees them in the Stars
Raqs finds them everywhere,
in Doha and in Mars
This doha talks in shadow speech
Where words fail Raqs, let commas reach
When nothing else will do, then Raqs
Try a line or two of madness,
which is but sanity, redux
In the forenoon read a doha, and then proceed
Raqs, for time to flower,
each moment’s desiring is the seed
Raqs waits for times to ripen
Today’s loads, let tomorrow lighten.
