A Day in the Life of Kiribati

The history of clock-making saw a definite turn when devices for understanding time shifted away from the fluid principles of ancient Chinese water and incense clocks – for which time was a continuum, thus making it more difficult to surgically separate past and present. In contrast, modern clocks, with their precise ticking seconds, impose rigid separations, creating conceptual barriers between moments. This disjunction makes “now” feel distant from “then” and yet, paradoxically, connects disparate places under a shared measure of time. In a syncopated sort of way, we are contemporaneous with other times and spaces.

In this syncopated simultaneity, the clock becomes a symbol of both concurrence and dissonance. While London and Lagos may share the same time, their experiences of “now” diverge, shaped by local contexts and histories.

A Day in the Life of Kiribati gives the time of Kiribati, an island on the Pacific Ocean, which bended the imaginary line of meridian to stay in the local time zone. It is also the first landon Earth to switch the calendar over to 2000, and which could be the first place on this planet to disappear with rising sea levels because of global warming. Here, timekeeping becomes both a marker of continuity and a reminder of impermanence.


Blood Moon

Time, in its boundless complexity, has been one of the central preoccupations for Raqs Media Collective. Their various devices to tell time unravel the many facets of temporality—its rhythm, its fluidity, its ruptures, and its ability to shape human experience. The word“raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs takes this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time.

Blood Moon is the recent piece made for the Hamburg Planetarium. Different orientations of the clock describe the ways in which the moon affects us as humans, in our hearts and on our skin, altering our sense of lived time. The objective, common time can be folded inward to that place where the duration between blooming by moonlight and being drenched by moonshine becomes a legible passage. Blood Moon invites us to rethink how we measure, inhabit, and imagine the passage of time—to perceive time not just as a continuum, but as an interplay of personal, cosmic, and historical dimensions. Moreover, it works as an alarm; a sign that planetary time, for us humans, might be running out.


Raqs Media Collective was founded in Dehli in 1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry.

Location of the work on Google Maps