Rakini Devi’s durational performance of Urban Kali explores the sensory dimensions of the body’s narrative that focuses on the female form as ritual and artefact. Her approach to performing Kali iconography reconstructs sacred female iconography through her interrogation of contemporary constructs of female identity.
Devi situates Kali iconography within a secular urban landscape, drawing on three decades of performances and research, including her doctoral thesis titled Urban Kali from sacred dance to secular performance, 2018.
The Bengali Goddess Kali’s reputation for inciting terror and love, and as the destroyer of time - or Kala, aligns with Devi’s performance activism that protests global misogyny, colonialism, and racism. The performance is also a personal reclamation from the relentless cultural appropriation of Kali iconography by Western feminism and commercialisation.
During the two-hour performance, Devi embodies Kali iconography by distilling her knowledge of two forms of Indian classical dance, Bharatanatyam and Odissi, using costume, gesture, actions, and props. She draws on her lived experience of Kali puja pandals (roadside temporary shrines) in her birth city of Kolkata.
Audiences can choose to stay or leave anytime during the two-hour performance.
The artist requests that taking selfies with her during the durational performance is strictly forbidden.
Artist Bio: Sydney-based Dr. Rakini Devi is an Australian performance and visual artist with an Indian-Burmese heritage. Devi integrates her knowledge of Indian Classical and contemporary dance, painting, writing and live art. She describes her performance practice as a predominantly visual art practice. Her work has a gendered inflection in that it investigates female iconography represented in both sacred and secular contexts in relation to modern society, using hybrid religious female iconography that protests global misogynist atrocities.
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