Urban Kali | Rakini Devi

Live art practitioner Rakini Devi continues to develop her ongoing body of work Urban Kali, (2017-) most recently presenting at super cool south Asian artist collective Kerfew in its most ambitious program yet: TESTING, a multi-sensory takeover of the entire Substation in Naarm/Melbourne. This version of Urban Kali with video installation by Karl Ockelford is a distillation of Rakini’s larger vision to create a large scale immersive multi-space version of Urban Kali, titled Temple of Kali, integrating her live art and installation practice.

“Kali remains my personal spiritual and artistic source in the creation of work. Using Her iconography enables me to address social and political themes from a place of stylised conceptual terrain rather than a naturalistic or presumptuous approach. Tantric Hindu worship of Kali depicted themes that were taboo, including sex, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. Today, political and religious taboo, severe censorship and crimes against humanity motivate my work. Since the nineties, my work has addressed misogynist atrocities in India including female infanticide.

“My performance activism is presented through the distillation of visual and performance art, and by embodying sacred female religious iconographies, for example The Female Pope and Kali. To situate Kali in the present, and as a permanent part of my urban life in a country not of my birth, I often perform under the title of Urban Kali, to demonstrate her relevance in the modern world. In The Female Pope, for example, I transform patriarchal religious iconography that challenges traditional gender roles in society and religion, whilst the central theme of Kali iconography is one that protests global misogyny.”

About the artist

Visit Rakini Devi’s website

Dr. Rakini Devi’s work can be described as intercultural hybrid performance art, integrating her knowledge of Indian Classical Dance and her visual arts practice. Devi’s performance personas are visual enactments and evocations of the body as living, ritual artifact. The subject of her practice as feminist activism and her 2018 doctorate Urban Kali centres on the “erasure” of women from global misogynist atrocities. Devi’s use of hybrid religious iconography draws from Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist, influences. Her iconisation of the female body as symbol is illustrated in her performance installations including The Female Pope, The Widow, Urban Kali, Kali Madonna and Inhabiting Erasures, with performances in Australia, US, UK, India, Indonesia, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Spain and Mexico. She continues her research-based practice in dance, live art, visual art and academic writing.

In the face of ephemerality and its erasures, it is consoling to reflect that the richness and power of Rakini Devi’s Inhabiting Erasures emanates not only from three decades of practice, but sustainingly from a several thousand-year-old cultural heritage which the artist perpetuates and idiosyncratically opens out, defying transience. Her art is born of a culture often beyond my comprehension, but that’s not say it’s beyond meaning as Devi’s imagery incorporates itself indelibly into my own night work, where art is most deeply felt. This is art that is at once modern (full of self-recognition, as Bourgeois would have it), powerfully ancient (felt like a shock of the old) and compelled by compassion that both respects and challenges tradition.

Keith Gallasch April 2021
https://www.realtime.org.au/rakini-devis-nightwork-the-performer-as-visual-artist/

Born and raised in Kolkata, Rakini Devi has spent most of her artistic journey engaging with feminist issues, be it dowry deaths in India or rampant femicide in Central and South America. Her newest Sydney exhibition ‘Inhabiting Erasures’ is inspired by Hindu goddesses, and displays never-before-seen journal paintings, light projections, meaningful performances and deeply informed statistics relating to the oppression of women. Her profound awareness of global atrocities against women across all classes of society, coupled with a passion for religious female iconography, has transformed her into an art activist well-equipped to comment on the issue through a divine lens.

Bageshri Savyasachi 2021
https://www.indianlink.com.au/arts/visual-arts/an-artistic-feminist-protest-by-rakini-devi/

This might be Kali, the mother her many followers believe her to be, and whom we finally meet fully face to face in the last scene in a blaze of glory, framed by a huge image of an eternally deep cave — not black, but a soft haven, a macrocosm seemingly made from a close-up of gently ruffled cloth and textured with a lovely half-melody. Urban and atheist as I am, I might not believe in Kali, but I welcome the emotionally complex connotations that swirl about her and acknowledge that for a secular society she has the power to evoke the sheer scale of the epic recurrency, individual and social, of the glory and the trauma that constitute life and death. Rakini Devi has given me a Kali to keep and reflect on.

Keith Gallasch 2017
https://www.realtime.org.au/urban-kali-face-to-face-with-kali/

Link to all Rakini Devi reviews in exegesis appendix: Urban Kali, From sacred dance to secular performance

Rakini Devi: Diasporic Subject and Agent Provocateur, Cambridge University Press, Theatre Research International. Helena Grehan, 2003.

History of Kali as performance

2024 Kali Shrine Ubud, Bali: https://rakinidevi.net/kali-shrine-bali-2024/

2022 Urban Kali 4a Gallery: https://rakinidevi.net/urban-kali-4a-gallery/

2020 Kali Madonna 3D film: https://rakinidevi.net/kali-madonna-vr/

2019 Kolkata Kali, India: https://rakinidevi.net/kolkata-kali/

2019 Kolkata Kali MCA Artbar: https://rakinidevi.net/kolkata-kali-2-mca-artbar/

2019 Urban Kali #2 The Lock Up: https://rakinidevi.net/urban-kali-2-the-lock-up/

2017 Urban Kali Doctoral presentation: https://rakinidevi.net/urban-kali/

2017 Hair of Kali, 107 Projects Redfern: https://rakinidevi.net/hair-of-kali/

2015 Kali the Black Madonna, Firstdraft: https://rakinidevi.net/kali-the-black-madonna/

2014 UOW Black Madonna: https://rakinidevi.net/black-madonna-uow/

2014 Kali Madonna Village Bizarre: https://rakinidevi.net/kali-madonna/

2010 Kali Digambar, Sweden.: https://rakinidevi.net/kali-digambar-2/