Inhabiting Erasures

Rakini Devi

Year the project commenced: 2019
Year it became impossible: 2020
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In 2020 Rakini Devi had planned to develop a new work with video artist Karl Ockelford. It became impossible when travel restrictions meant that Melbourne-based Ockelford was unable to join Devi in Sydney. As such, Devi transformed the work into a solo installation and performance art project. So, in September 2020, as the artist in residence at Rex Cramphorn Studios, University of Sydney, Devi amended the project to work solo. "My aim was to develop strategies towards a multidisciplinary installation comprising of three canopies, props, ritual objects, costumes, journal drawings and paintings, and incorporating my own body as art during the two-week period. Each of the three canopies I experimented with housed a different aspect of female embodiment."
"Each installation and floor chalk artwork featured notions of female erasure, by historic and current misogynist violence. The texts that surround the chalk drawings are a composite of sacred Hindu texts and current statistics of Indian misogyny and atrocities towards women, including many women in Australia and globally who have suffered from "lockdown" domestic violence and murder. In June I participated in an international conference curated by Critical Path, da:ns lab 2020, discussing Covid's effects on art, race, privilege, and the erasure of culture. These discussions of the cultural body being erased, the politics of privilege in relation to race and access also influenced my work. The "impossible" situation brought about by the pandemic was adapted and re-channeled into developing my own solo practice, a result that I am extremely please with and grateful for the opportunity to have completed."
This project commenced in 2019 as Body as Archive, which can be viewed HERE.
A video document of Devi's development can be viewed HERE.

Visual art, concept and installation - Rakini Devi 
Production & Video Documentation - Richard Manner 
Photography - Heidrun Löhr 
This project was supported through a residency at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, the University of Sydney 
And Create NSW Quick Response Grant 2020

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