Works, Experiments, Experiences
Raghu Rao Karkala’s art practice covers three decades of explorations in various genres, including painting, installation and video.
He explored the idea of conceptual art along with his peers since its early days in India, and participated in numerous solo and group shows in India, Europe, and North America.
He has undertaken residencies in Switzerland, Scotland, and Mauritius, as well as numerous locations in India itself, and a major collaborative art festival in Lille, France.
The central theme of this set of work explores the experience of disability, and a disabled person’s view of and engagement with the natural landscape, utilising a visual language that employs Installation, Painting and Drawing.
This project is supported and funded by Canada Council for the Arts for the year 2025.
Disability and Healing Landscapes
In this project, Raghavendra seeks to tell the stories of those who occupy little space in the grand narratives of the world, minorities not only in terms of race, gender, and religious affiliation, but those who dissent against oppressive mindsets and overwhelming power.
This project was supported and funded by Canada Council for the Arts for the year 2022-23.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=736823205473471
Dissenting Views/ Viewing Dissent
"Mending Cracks" is a multidisciplinary art series by Raghavendra Rao K.V. (Raghu Rao) that explores themes of trauma, memory, disability, and recovery, rooted in his experience surviving the 2001 Kutch earthquake. Using mixed media, including watercolors, installations, and, in some cases, X-ray sheets, the work visually addresses personal and collective.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1163822150810148
Mending Cracks; Beyond
This set of paintings, small-sized paintings in acrylic on canvas and two larger images in acrylic on cloth tarpaulin, represent the effort to bring together processes, surfaces and imageries that are not always seen together. The tarpaulin serves as a metaphor for migration – life on the move. The surface for the small paintings is canvas – coarse and richly layered with paint. The main figures in the paintings are small and centrally placed, frozen in a kind of formal pose, with intentionality, reminiscent of miniature portraiture.