BIO
Born in Sri Lanka in 1983, Raki Nikahetiya and his parents left the country during times of civil war. They moved to Austria, and reality ruptured between two cultural poles. He studied Economics in Vienna and started off as a photojournalist, before joining the United Nations in 2009. After a five year posting and a cache of experience in international development work, he moved to London. He continued his engagement in trade development and environmental conservation in Asia and Africa before fully focussing on his art practice.
Now working and traversing between New Delhi, London, Vienna and Colombo, Raki focuses on interdisciplinary exploration. Self-taught in documentary photography he started his interdisciplinary path after completing a foundation course at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. As an artist with a migrant background, the documentary aspect focused on individual as well as collective heritage, culture and identity.
Today his interdisciplinary work pushes this further through the use of photographic negatives, traditional and digital painting, use of artisanal handwork, video and scientific experiments. Raki is interested in the interdisciplinary approach as a tool to depict interconnectivity of things and the interdependency between different realms - to question our understanding of self and what we accept as reality.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice focuses on identity, alienation and belonging in the 21st century. What do we accept as the self and what as our origins? How do we construct and perceive value, reality and meaning? What role does memory and culture play?
Growing up as an (im)migrant deeply changed the way I saw the world. Today I am still a migrant, my studio is migratory too and I am interested in the identity of collectives, individuals and things, the unchallenged and unknown - questioning man-made concepts of what is “real”, “right” and “true”. I am using my work to reflect and question these topics and I use an interdisciplinary approach - with photography, documentation and our perception sitting at its core – to look beyond boundaries.
My conceptual work lies in the intersection of classical visual art, process oriented abstraction, traditional handicrafts and scientific exploration. I am interested in ancient weaving and embroidery techniques as well as digital painting methods. I use photographic negatives but also venture into other realms through the help of science and the use of electron microscope photography. Our species evolved over aeons through migrating, by sharing knowledge and by using the most advanced skills of the collective to realise ideas. As such my interdisciplinary pursuit is to find the most suitable processes and means to express, discover and explore the fundamental questions in my practice.