Inhabit

Rakini’s performance research protests global misogyny and challenges cultural stereotypes by embodying sacred female iconographies in live art and installation.

For this development, Rakini continues her exploration of creating and developing a new multidisciplinary immersive installation that explores themes of female erasure, and historic and current misogynist violence.

She will develop methods of integrating female iconographies depicting traces of the (absent) female body using her painted cut-out figures, installation, and live art. This new work is inspired by the artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), and Hindu Goddess mythologies of Shaki Peeth, or sacred female sites.

This project is part of Vitals’ URGE Development Program.

URGE is a development stream supporting artists and projects from early ideas through to presentation-ready performance, with developments, residencies, workshops and laboratories taking place both locally and in partnerships across the country.

About the Artist

Rakini Devi

Rakini’s performance aesthetic represents a distillation of her embodied knowledge in cultural hybrid performance art and culture. Her multidisciplinary performance practice and the subject of her 2018 doctoral thesis Urban Kali: From Sacred Dance to Secular Performance explored Hindu Kali iconography as feminist performance activism. In recent years, Rakini is known for presenting her elaborate durational performance installations The Female Pope and Kali, however these are just two works in her repertoire, and do not represent her practice in its entirety, which includes dance, painting, installation and writing. She has been developing her live art practice since 2003-2007, when she was invited to perform with Mexican Performance art troupe Guillermo Gomez Pena’s Pocha Nostra, with residencies and performances in the US and UK. Rakini also participated in Live art laboratories with Boris Neilsony (Blackmarket International) and Melati Suryadarmo (Germany/Indonesia) since 2009. From 2015-2018, she was part of a Sydney live art group basemetal, facilitated by Julie Vulcan, where they regularly met and experimented with live art in public spaces.

Men Play

After 100 years of tradition in Australia, a once popular sport played exclusively by men and boys is about to become extinct. Over a series of meetings, a committee of dedicated players scramble to save their sport in the wake of institutional crisis and social change.

See project

About the Artist

Other Projects

Mortified

Men Play

Evil Hour