Mumbai-based gallery Art Musings hosts an exhibition of works entitled ‘Exquisite Cadaver’ by Raghava KK. This is his third solo exhibition at the venue. He says of his new body of works, “It’s a series of artwork that has arisen from a recent diasporic dilemma. I perform many roles - artist, Indian, American, father, husband, parent, child, student, teacher. Even within the art world itself, I am a thinker, a philosopher, an ingénue, and also a seller of beauty, a businessman, a politician.
“So fragmented is my identity, that I find it rather caricatured to identify with any one predominant role. ‘Exquisite Cadaver’ is a game that represents a more complex search for identity and truth. Now, I play exquisite cadaver with my fragmented selves, creating a series of mythological characters, borrowing from tradition, history, and even my own nostalgia. Each of the works has been created simultaneously in parts, fragmenting the storyline that runs through the series. Through this body of works, I am creating the mythology of the post-post-contemporary diasporic Indian, one that becomes coherent only in its entirety.”
A self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist, Raghava KK began as a cartoonist in 1997 with leading Indian publications. He works in genres as disparate as iPad Art, painting, film, installation, multimedia and performance. His work conceptually grapples with the construct of identity, gender and sexuality, and the absence of interpersonal context in today's world of online identity performance.
His exhibits at Purdah 2.0 (New York), Brooklyn Bound R Train (Art Musings, Mumbai), Carre d'Art Musee d'Art Contemporain (Nimes, France) and Radical Topography (Giacobetti Paul Gallery, New York) focus on how his recent move to New York City has shaped his identity transformation. More recently, he created and taught a course on art, technology, and storytelling at NuVu Studios, a program out of the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA, USA), which he will continue to teach.
CNN named him as one of the ten most fascinating people the world is yet to know of. Raghava KK is always exploring new avenues to expand his creativity. Legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon invited him to create a painting that featured as the artwork for his 2011 global tour.
Mumbai-based gallery Art Musings hosts an exhibition of works entitled ‘Exquisite Cadaver’ by Raghava KK. This is his third solo exhibition at the venue. He says of his new body of works, “It’s a series of artwork that has arisen from a recent diasporic dilemma. I perform many roles - artist, Indian, American, father, husband, parent, child, student, teacher. Even within the art world itself, I am a thinker, a philosopher, an ingénue, and also a seller of beauty, a businessman, a politician.
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