Bundanon

Kolkata born Dr. Rakini Devi is a multidisciplinary artist with an Indian-Burmese heritage.

She describes her work as a predominantly visual art practice, integrating her knowledge of Indian Classical and contemporary dance, painting, writing, live art and installation. Her three decades of research-based practice centres on hybrid religious female iconography that protests global misogyny.

She is a recipient of a 2001 Australia Council Dance Fellowship, amongst other awards. She completed a DCA (Doctor of Creative Arts, UOW) in 2018, presenting her exegesis, Urban Kali, From Sacred Dance to Secular Performance.

In 2021 she presented her first solo multidisciplinary art exhibition, at Articulate Gallery, Sydney, titled Inhabiting Erasures: Embodying traces of the feminine, funded by Create NSW.

In April 2022 she presented her elaborate performance installations The Female Pope at the AGNSW for Monumental, Reliquary Body for Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks, and Urban Kali at 4A Gallery.

In Residence at Bundanon

Following my first solo exhibition last year, I propose to develop new work, using my method of painting, installation, and writing, inspired by the surrounding landscapes of Bundanon. The residency will expand and deepen my ongoing themes of erasure, memory, identity, displacement, and culture in the context of feminist performance activism. My work embraces ritual, and a method I describe in my thesis Urban Kali, 2018, as “tradition as transgression” whereby I create and perform/paint my own interpretations of sacred mythology.