Kali Shrine | Rakini Devi

Indian born Sydney based multidisciplinary artist Dr. Rakini Devi’s Goddess Kali iconography as performance ritual is inspired by the temporary shrines in her birthplace Kolkata (called pandals) that traditionally adorn the city during Hindu festivals, and her training in Indian classical dance. The work celebrates the female body as sacred site and as feminist performance activism.

In a climate of racial tension, war, and the rise of global misogynist crimes, Rakini Devi’s performance of embodied iconography protests these atrocities. Her performance practice is the subject of her 2018 doctorate, titled Urban Kali, from sacred dance to secular performance.

Kali Shrine adhered to the theme of Indonesia Bertutur Festival, that celebrated cultural heritage, sustainable culture, and art as a source of knowledge. This is the second sitespecific work performed by Devi in Indonesia curated by Melati Suryadarmo, the first being in Solo, Indonesia, titled The Human Shrine, for PALA live art Festival in 2009. This durational site -specific work was presented at the beautiful Neka Art Museum, Ubud, Bali.

Devi has performed the theme of the Goddess Kali over two decades, in various incarnations and styles, as dance, theatre, and live art installation. Each live art performance is inspired by the architecture, cultural and historical importance of the environment. Kali Shrine for Indonesia Bertutur was a three-hour durational work that included sound and continuous stylised actions and dance-based movement.

Production history

2017 Urban Kali, Lennox Theatre, Sydney, presented by UOW and Form Dance

2022 Urban Kali, 4a Gallery, Sydney, produced by Intimate Spectacle

2020 Kali Madonna 3D film directed by Carlos Gomes filmed by Samuel James

2019 Kolkata Kali, Site specific performance, India

2019 Kolkata Kali #2 Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, video and live art performance for Artbar

2014 Kali Madonna 2014 Village Bizarre, The Rocks Sydney, seven- week performance installation

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, Indian Ink 2021

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.