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As you enter Raqs Media Collective’s exhibition ‘Twilight Language’ at the Whitworth in Manchester, the gallery lights are dimmed: as the title suggests, this show is set at nightfall A sculptural lighthouse, Unusually Adrift from the Shoreline (2008/2017) sends out an intermittent beacon, illuminating a collection of disparate installations    Among them is a set of new works that inquire into Manchester’s past In Prostheses for the History of Insurgent Crowds (2017), wax body parts run, walk, kick and fly over wall panels decorated with geometric prints These are replicas of the prosthetic limbs which proliferated during the city’s industrial revolution, due to a rise in accidents in the workplace According to Raqs’s co-founder, Jeebesh Bagchi, the piece was inspired by the contrasting stories of injury and collective action that emerged while the group was undertaking archival research – stories of the loss of limbs in the workplace, and the many bodies that came together in protest during the city’s labour movement   In collaboration with architects Palak Jhunjhunwala and Efstratios Georgiou, Raqs also developed a crystal structure using 3D-printed plastic, resin, and plywood, that will grow for the duration of the exhibition The installation, Alive, with Cerussite and Peppered Moth (2017), is enhanced by what Bagchi refers to as the ‘biological time’ of the peppered moth, a white insect with a few brown dots that became rarer in Manchester during the industrial revolution As the city grew dirtier, the moth is said to have stood out against the dark surfaces of buildings and trees, making it vulnerable to birds – until, through a process of natural selection, darker moths became more prevalent The moth is represented by sound and two videos projected onto the crystal structure, at moments identifiable by the fluttering of its wings, at others as a fractured and elusive shadow   Raqs Media Collective was founded by Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Jeebesh Bagchi in 1992, after they studied documentary film together at Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi The