BCA#3: Art and Identity in an Age of Transitions

Raghava KK Named by CNN as one of the 10 most remarkable people in 2010, Raghava KK is a multidisciplinary artist and entrepreneur working at the intersection of art, science, technology, education and entrepreneurship. Raghava KK’s art explores transcendence for the digital anthropocene without sacrificing the particular. Aside from working with traditional forms (painting, installation and performance) Raghava’s art practice involves inventing media to express post-human contemporary realities. His painting exhibitions, instead of asserting identity, disturb the limits of the social and the perceptual self through the friction between found digital elements. His neuro-feedback artworks like MonaLisa 2.0 and his visual discovery engine Must#, anchor digital algorithms in physical space and in the specific locus of the viewer’s body and her emotions. His iPad art book Pop-it, launched at TED Global in 2011, which presents children with multiple perspectives on the concept of the ideal family, won several awards, including a Best of 2011 award from Kirkus. Raghava’s talk on visioning for 200 years was launched at TED. He has conducted talks and workshops for visionaries such as Tom Hanks, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey to think about the role of creativity in the future. Raghava was inducted into the National Geographic Society in 2013 as an Explorer for pushing the boundaries of scientific exploration through art. Artistic creativity for him is a deeply decentred enterprise shared with the users of the artwork, which is evident in his numerous collaborations with other artists, technologists, corporations, educationists, scientists, academia. His lectures, including 5 TED talks, are known for inspiring his audiences to expand their socially and psychologically settled selves using art. Raghava has been a keynote speaker at top conferences including Wired, Google, DLD, TIE, TED, Cities Summit, Israel, YPO, UN, NOVUS, etc. In 2019, Raghava was invited to speak at the UN headquarters on the occasion of man landing on the moon to present a vision for the future of art and culture. The popular Netflix show ‘The Creative Indians’ dedicated an episode on his art and life. Solo exhibitions with Art Musings include Sublime Machines, 2018; Ridiculous Copycats, 2015; That’s All Folks, 2013; Exquisite Cadaver, 2011; Brooklyn Bound R-Train, 2009/10 and Drawn and Quartered, 2008. He has also shown with Art Musings in several editions of the India Art Fair, New Delhi. The artist lives and works in Woodstock, NY and Bangalore, India.

Shilo Shiv Suleman (born Bengaluru,1989) is an artist whose work is sustained by commitments to poetry, technology and social justice. Suleman’s art combines magical realism, technology and social justice. She articulates her work across several platforms, including exhibitions, festivals and conferences. Shilo is the founder-director of the Fearless Collective, a movement that aims to replace fear with love in public space. She has worked with communities across the world by facilitating and leading public art interventions, for instance, with indigenous communities in Brazil, displaced and migrant communities in Beirut, queer activists in South Africa, and transgender activists in Pakistan. She has created large-scale installations for The Burning Man Festival and apps that respond to human brainwaves, which have been featured on TED. As an INK fellow, her work became known when her talk made it to TED.com, and got over a million views in 2012. She was chosen as one of three pioneering Indian women at TED Global, and has spoken at conferences like WIRED, DLD in London and Munich. More recently, she founded a collective of over 400 artists in India using community art to protest gender violence for which she was featured in a host of documentaries including Rebel Music by MTV. Awards include the Femina ‘Woman of Worth’, the New India Express 'Devi Awards in 2015 and the Future books Digital Innovation in London. In 2014, Shilo received several grants and residencies – including two honorarium grants from Burning Man for the interactive art installations: Pulse & Bloom, and Grove – for her collaborations with a neuroscientist, aimed at creating art that interacts with human brainwaves and other biofeedback sensors. These biofeedback installations have brought together artists, architects, entrepreneurs, builders and neurotechnologists, and have been featured on international media including BBC, Rolling Stone, MSNBC, Tech Crunch, The Guardian and WIRED, and have been exhibited at the Southbank Centre, London. Shilo’s solo exhibitions include ‘Beloved’ (2015) with Art Musings. Shilo also showcased her work at the 20th anniversary of Art Musings, where she showcased a body of work in various medium including wood cut, embroidery, painting and sculpture.

Ranjit Hoskote has been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism and curatorial practice, and is also a leading Anglophone Indian poet. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking 2014), and Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton 2018); and the monographs Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König 2010) and Atul Dodiya (Prestel 2014). Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). He co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim (2008). He was co-convenor, with Maria Hlavajova, Kathrin Rhomberg and Boris Groys, of the exhibition-conference platform Documents, Constellations, Prospects (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013). He co-curated, with Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, the exhibition-conference platform The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, 2016).

Maya Burman's technique is a slow step-by-step process. She makes a pencil sketch first, and then applies the layer of watercolors and finishes the outlines and detail in black ink with a pen. The paintings are a meeting ground of two cultures - Indian as well as French. The details of Indian miniature painting and European Middle Age architecture merge in her art, and literature and poetry are also very much present. Maya’s paintings are peopled, made up of characters that live in mythology and metaphor. Her figures float through fields, their bodies curving with the shapes of the landscape. Patterns weave and float around the central forms evoking a sense of exuberance and joie de vivre. Maya creates a dreamlike fairyland in her paintings. Her former training in architecture influences her work, visible in the scenes set within arches, columns and porches. Burman's detailed paintings have a tapestry like effect where everything is subordinate to floral, decorative patterning, reminiscent of the French art nouveau tradition. The artist has had several solo exhibitions with Art Musings including A Dreamer’s Labyrinth, 2010; and Once Upon A Time, 2007. Her recent exhibition in India was with Art Musings in 2016, entitled The Flower & the Bulb, where she featured her works alongside her mother, artist Maite Delteil.