The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet was a newly commissioned film installation combining historical photographs from collections in London and Delhi with video, animation, and a soundscape of overlapping voices. Presented in the Art Now Lightbox at Tate Britain, 4 September - 27 December 2009.

View a film prelude to the work above. Or download the film to your personal computer by clicking on the link below.

Image from The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet © Raqs Media Collective 2009

A development of the lecture-performance format commonly employed by the artists, presented as a sequence of short films within films, this moving-image artwork uses techniques of juxtaposition to converge a set of histories with the present. Stories leak, histories collide; bones, bodies, faces and handwriting blur; crowds gather and move en masse.

Composite photographs by Frances Galton, with permission from Galton Papers, UCL Special Collections

Reflecting upon the ways in which ethnicity and ‘type’ have been characterised, animated elements resemble scientific instruments, such as those once used to measure the human skull in an attempt to determine levels of intelligence or those used to extract biometric data from today’s passports. 

Photographs of institutionalised individuals by Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century anthropologist interested in the synthesis of human typologies, are layered into video footage capturing the movement of people from place to place. 

Image from The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet © Raqs Media Collective 2009

Installation elements framed the film within a setting for a lecture: a table, chair and microphone, an invitation to be seated, an absent speaker and the anticipation of discourse.

Intentionally open-ended and anti-documentary, the work examined how collectivity and anonymity have been represented over time and how, in the present, the conditions of post-colonialism and globalisation contribute to an ongoing crisis of identity and entitlement.

Image from The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet © Raqs Media Collective 2009

Monica Narula, from Raqs Media Collective, gave a short conceptual-lecture in conjunction with the opening of the work for Late at Tate on September 4, 2009. 

Photographs by Francis Galton are re-produced within the artwork with permission from the Galton Papers, UCL Special Collections.

The photograph by Felice Beato is reproduced within the artwork with permission from the Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi.

Courtesy of the Artists and Frith Street Gallery, London.