https://www.rakiography.com/work daily 0.75 2026-04-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/1637756929642-NJUTX4WFWHA38ZAPI9N7/A+simpler+life+Raki+Nikahetiya.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/1668686776949-BX1A21SZ6CD5NB0FQLSN/The+Differences+d+-+V.I.R.A.L+-+Raki+Nikahetiya.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/1669631770278-QQ9SQIQMY1SIVHLND0Q5/Lapland+Finland+Raki+Nikahetiya1.jpg WORK UNTITLED Hahnemühle Fine Art Lustre Paper 30 x 45 CM 2013 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/9d135084-a960-4bd7-a892-11967f75919b/2.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/c18e87bf-3a36-4505-85c6-32fef1936c96/3.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/7468f833-b7de-4337-b19e-68841c4a3276/1.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/4da9444c-b30c-4bbd-b10b-bb7de0a86bf3/4.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/62a8ac16-53d1-4c7d-b319-20eccc1d8d52/5.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/ffec7f92-3bb5-434d-b7aa-0613aa97641c/Copy+of+Beige+and+White+Be+Yourself+Square+Pillow+%281%29.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/c5e4cf42-5289-49e1-a96b-0f12fc1539c1/8.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/66a27b74-fd22-4f27-bf51-0240d7092ebb/9.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/e7a99faa-70b4-4b66-9a10-9a6d3336495c/11.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/62b9d965-1bed-428b-91e7-40242b9059bf/10.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/6a931c17-bc69-44cb-8980-fe7ea6bc5b4f/Copy+of+Beige+and+White+Be+Yourself+Square+Pillow+%281%29.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/a07fa475-34ae-4633-990e-f7a6b4f27255/7.png WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/c43c4021-b320-4f4c-a409-fd2d129da8f6/Copy+of+Beige+and+White+Be+Yourself+Square+Pillow+%281%29+copy.png WORK https://www.rakiography.com/new-index-1 daily 0.75 2022-11-17 https://www.rakiography.com/essays daily 0.75 2026-04-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/022b5f6c-4639-4a8c-81ab-7ad8ec04b0c1/Bild+013d.jpg ESSAYS - on MIGRATORY ART Vienna / London / Delhi / Colombo, ongoing. If you had to leave this instant, uncertain of return, what would you take with you? In September 1989, during the early years of war in Sri Lanka, departure came with two suitcases - a memory remembered less for what was packed than for the feeling that all that was needed could be carried. That sense became the origin of a practice shaped by movement, impermanence, and the negotiation between presence and absence. Migration became not merely an event but a way of being, a lens for understanding how life, memory, and creativity persist in flux. Migratory Art emerged as a response to these conditions. It is art shaped by movement, but also art that itself moves -across places, contexts, and forms. The work often arises in collaboration, outside familiar frameworks of knowledge, in temporary studios and borrowed spaces. It constantly asks what can be carried forward and what must be let go. Some works fit into hand luggage - literally - while others carry memory, story, or emotion. Together, they inhabit the tension between departure and arrival. The studio in this practice is never fixed. It forms wherever creation takes place - across disciplines, locations, and encounters - shaped by circumstance but attentive to process. Migration is understood not only as a geopolitical reality, but as an emotional and epistemological condition: a way of knowing, of learning, of engaging with the world in flux. The work reflects broader patterns of movement - of people, materials, knowledge, and care - responding to a world shaped by precarity, instability, and adaptation. Rather than resisting these conditions, the practice works within them, proposing art that is portable, mutable, collaborative, and open to transformation. The Migratory Studio models a practice beyond permanence: a porous space of exchange, improvisation, and encounter, where creation emerges not in isolation but through contact. At its core, Migratory Art asks what is preserved when everything else must be left behind, what fragments endure, and how they allow self, story, and place to be reconstructed. It is a practice that holds continuity in movement, reflection in transition, and possibility in uncertainty - an art that survives, travels, and transforms with the journeys it undertakes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/1775095649180-JKMBY3EO1WWQSWOPTC9D/Bild%2B013d.jpg ESSAYS - on MIGRATORY ART Vienna / London / Delhi / Colombo, ongoing. If you had to leave this instant, uncertain of return, what would you take with you? In September 1989, during the early years of war in Sri Lanka, departure came with two suitcases - a memory remembered less for what was packed than for the feeling that all that was needed could be carried. That sense became the origin of a practice shaped by movement, impermanence, and the negotiation between presence and absence. Migration became not merely an event but a way of being, a lens for understanding how life, memory, and creativity persist in flux. Migratory Art emerged as a response to these conditions. It is art shaped by movement, but also art that itself moves -across places, contexts, and forms. The work often arises in collaboration, outside familiar frameworks of knowledge, in temporary studios and borrowed spaces. It constantly asks what can be carried forward and what must be let go. Some works fit into hand luggage - literally - while others carry memory, story, or emotion. Together, they inhabit the tension between departure and arrival. The studio in this practice is never fixed. It forms wherever creation takes place - across disciplines, locations, and encounters - shaped by circumstance but attentive to process. Migration is understood not only as a geopolitical reality, but as an emotional and epistemological condition: a way of knowing, of learning, of engaging with the world in flux. The work reflects broader patterns of movement - of people, materials, knowledge, and care - responding to a world shaped by precarity, instability, and adaptation. Rather than resisting these conditions, the practice works within them, proposing art that is portable, mutable, collaborative, and open to transformation. The Migratory Studio models a practice beyond permanence: a porous space of exchange, improvisation, and encounter, where creation emerges not in isolation but through contact. At its core, Migratory Art asks what is preserved when everything else must be left behind, what fragments endure, and how they allow self, story, and place to be reconstructed. It is a practice that holds continuity in movement, reflection in transition, and possibility in uncertainty - an art that survives, travels, and transforms with the journeys it undertakes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/022b5f6c-4639-4a8c-81ab-7ad8ec04b0c1/Bild+013d.jpg ESSAYS - on MIGRATORY ART Vienna / London / Delhi / Colombo, ongoing. If you had to leave this instant, uncertain of return, what would you take with you? In September 1989, during the early years of war in Sri Lanka, departure came with two suitcases - a memory remembered less for what was packed than for the feeling that all that was needed could be carried. That sense became the origin of a practice shaped by movement, impermanence, and the negotiation between presence and absence. Migration became not merely an event but a way of being, a lens for understanding how life, memory, and creativity persist in flux. Migratory Art emerged as a response to these conditions. It is art shaped by movement, but also art that itself moves -across places, contexts, and forms. The work often arises in collaboration, outside familiar frameworks of knowledge, in temporary studios and borrowed spaces. It constantly asks what can be carried forward and what must be let go. Some works fit into hand luggage - literally - while others carry memory, story, or emotion. Together, they inhabit the tension between departure and arrival. The studio in this practice is never fixed. It forms wherever creation takes place - across disciplines, locations, and encounters - shaped by circumstance but attentive to process. Migration is understood not only as a geopolitical reality, but as an emotional and epistemological condition: a way of knowing, of learning, of engaging with the world in flux. The work reflects broader patterns of movement - of people, materials, knowledge, and care - responding to a world shaped by precarity, instability, and adaptation. Rather than resisting these conditions, the practice works within them, proposing art that is portable, mutable, collaborative, and open to transformation. The Migratory Studio models a practice beyond permanence: a porous space of exchange, improvisation, and encounter, where creation emerges not in isolation but through contact. At its core, Migratory Art asks what is preserved when everything else must be left behind, what fragments endure, and how they allow self, story, and place to be reconstructed. It is a practice that holds continuity in movement, reflection in transition, and possibility in uncertainty - an art that survives, travels, and transforms with the journeys it undertakes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/b1d7b88f-ff97-4eb6-98de-b9d44064de22/DSC07981.png ESSAYS - on REGENERATION and (LAND) ART Delhi / Colombo What does it mean to make art with the land, rather than merely on it? This question guides the practice, where Land Art becomes a way to enter into relationship with place rather than impose upon it. In fragile landscapes - where resilience is woven into daily life - art is approached as a practice of renewal, not merely of aesthetics. It challenges extraction - of soil, of culture, of memory -and asks for gestures that respond to deep time, attuned to cycles of the land and the stories it holds. Materials are chosen for their capacity to endure, adapt, and transform: earth, wool, glacial silt, ancestral pigments, or salvaged matter. Impermanence becomes a principle, not a limitation. Some works respond to immediate ecological or social conditions; others carry memory, story, or practice that can migrate across people, contexts, and spaces. The studio exists wherever creation happens - a stream, a pasture, a courtyard, a temporary shelter - and the practice moves with it. Work unfolds through encounters, collaboration, and observation, drawing on intergenerational knowledge and dialogue to build understanding across disciplines and communities. Artworks become propositions rather than objects: seed-saving archives, listening stations, nomadic classrooms, or micro-ecosystems. They are designed to move, to adapt, and to carry knowledge forward. The emphasis is on process, care, and potential rather than permanence or spectacle. Regenerative Land Art, within this practice, listens, responds, and transforms. It is art as stewardship, as seed, as a model for living otherwise - a practice shaped by place, by collaboration, and by the movement of ideas, materials, and people, an art that travels as it regenerates. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/69cdcc4de02d79389790d6bd/69cdcc8fe2771656a6cfaa45/1775096019410/ ESSAYS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/fd3f86f4-dff4-477c-a78d-b7dd1b28ab61/PXL_20220415_131926371.jpg ESSAYS - on MATERIAL and (POST) MEMORY Calcutta / Delhi / Colombo, ongoing Zardozi and Aari embroidery. Silk, velvet, and cotton - materials returned to again and again - carry an ancestral resonance, echoing garments once worn by forebears in ceremonies, daily rituals, and lives now slipping beyond the reach of record. Since 2020, collaboration has continued with Reyas Ali, his wife, and his Zardozi and Aari embroidery team in Calcutta - Kutub Udink, Yousuf Mulla, Imtiaz Alam, Alim Khan, Najim Udin, Rukunuddin Mundul, and Raja Sheik - where every stitch embodies memory and craft. Fragments of ceremonial heirlooms, worn fabrics, and remnants of formal dress are gathered slowly. Time, like the humid air of the hills, has left its mark: mould, decay, and discolouration carry the burden of forgetting. Yet stories persist in the gestures of elders, in smells, and in repeated domestic rituals. This practice does not seek a neat lineage or uninterrupted chronology. Instead, it dwells in gaps - half-remembered moments, emotionally precise yet factually vague. Atmospheres are traced: the leeches after rain, the heavy tropical air, cousins playing barefoot, the porch where stories were told, the dense comfort of the forest, the scent of cannonball blossoms, the glow of petrol lamps, the warmth and taste of dalli-kussiya prepared over coconut-wood fires. These traces constitute knowledge and inheritance. The materials anchor this practice. They allow a sense of belonging to be stitched together - layered, nonlinear, partly imagined. In the deep green of the jungle or on a mountain near the equator, the threads of home are carried, traced, and reassembled through memory, craft, and encounter. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/aeb03cfd-a4ed-4a6c-bb73-ca68e2eb765e/ATTHA-1+copy.jpg ESSAYS - on IDENTITY New Delhi / Colombo / Vienna What are our earliest memories? Who shaped us? And who have we become in remembering? “One of my oldest memories is a black Sri Lankan Sanni Yakuma mask. Sanni masks are used by shamans for tovils (exorcism rituals), to play the role of sanni (disease) demons. There are 18 different masks but one of them I remember in particular. When I was four or five I used to wake up for weeks shaken by nightmares. As this continued my grandfather, who believed in the old ways asked for a shaman. The day for the ritual arrived, we both marched in silence through the darkness of the night to a shed on his land. The narrow path was illuminated by the light trails of fireflies, stars piercing through the crowns of coconut trees and the dim light of our petrol lamp. The door to the shed opened and the shaman welcomed me only. The air was heavy, warm and smelled of incense. The walls were drenched in flickering ochre red from the light of small coconut oil lamps. He was wearing the sanni mask and looked gruesome as he started practicing a dance. He sang prayers in Sinhala but I didn't understand him. He was in a trance. And so was I - watching his movements carve through the thick air, gestures both foreign and familiar. Time collapsed. The ritual ended as suddenly as it began. My grandfather and I walked back through the same path - silent, under the same fireflies and trees- but something had shifted. I didn’t fully understand what had taken place, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, I realised: the nightmares had stopped. The fear was gone. And in its place, a memory remained - vivid, unresolved, but somehow whole.” This moment - both obscure and formative - continues to inform a practice shaped by the convergence of embodied memory and displacement. It is shaped by the overlap of lived experience, inherited stories, and the influence of cultural rituals that continue across generations. Old family photographs form an important starting point: images gathered from relatives, from storage boxes, from memory itself. Taken before migration to Europe, they offer glimpses into a past that feels both close and out of reach. Painting becomes a way of returning to these images - not to recreate them exactly, but to reconnect with what they carry. Each portrait holds a trace: a gesture, a mood, a small detail that lingers. Memory does not unfold in a straight line; it moves through association, through feeling. Even difficult histories, such as the war in Sri Lanka, are remembered in complex ways - alongside images of childhood, landscape, and everyday life. Jungle paths, family rituals, and sensory impressions remain, shaped over time by distance and reflection. Over time, the work shifts from painting into embroidery. These painted memories are translated into hand-embroidered silk portraits, drawing on craft traditions connected to belonging, lineage, and care. The act of stitching becomes important in itself - slow, repetitive, and attentive. Through this process, memory is not fixed but worked through, thread by thread. The works move across forms and contexts: from digital to handmade, from image to object, from private memory to something shared. The embroidered portraits can be seen as vessels of memory - holding fragments of experience that are both personal and collective. They preserve, but they also change what they hold. Like thread, memory can stretch, knot, or break. What emerges is not a clear history, but something closer to a personal mythology: a way of making sense of identity through fragments, sensations, and acts of care. Identity, in this practice, is not stable or singular. It is layered, shifting, and shaped by movement - between places, between past and present, between what is remembered and what is imagined. Each work becomes part of an ongoing process of bringing these fragments together. Not to resolve them, but to stay with them - to understand how belonging can be formed even when it is incomplete, and how memory continues to shape who and what we are becoming. Related work: A SIMPLER LIFE, ANOTHER LIFE and MIGRANT MEMORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/1775096150959-NCX6GUYDHCENPHANXSIC/IMG_20210223_132125396.jpg ESSAYS - on INTERDISCIPLINARY PHOTOGRAPHY London / Delhi / Colombo, ongoing What do we see when we look at a photograph? Is it a moment, a memory, or an illusion of permanence? As Susan Sontag observed, photographs offer a way of holding onto what cannot be possessed - transforming absence into image, and experience into something that can be revisited. Photography becomes a paradox: a tool for anchoring the fleeting, while also reminding us of what has already passed. Within this practice, photography is not treated simply as a medium, but as a point of departure. Early engagement with analogue processes—slow, deliberate, and dependent on time and light - foregrounded attention, patience, and uncertainty. With the shift to digital, the image became more immediate and flexible, yet its role remained consistent: not to capture reality perfectly, but to engage with it. The photograph functions less as a record and more as an active process - an attempt to understand, shape, and momentarily hold what often feels unstable or out of reach. Over time, the limits of the photographic image itself come into question. What happens when the photograph is no longer the final outcome, but the starting point for something else? Images begin to move - into performance, sculpture, installation, sound, or text. They become material for further transformation, capable of generating new forms and experiences. What emerges from this shift can be understood as interdisciplinary photography: not a fixed category, but a way of working across boundaries. Here, the image initiates a dialogue between disciplines, materials, and ways of knowing. The camera becomes less a passive observer and more a collaborator, opening pathways rather than closing them. This approach challenges the idea of photography as objective or documentary. Instead of fixing reality, it reimagines it. Images are no longer endpoints but evolving forms: able to shift, translate, and adapt. Boundaries between mediums begin to dissolve: image becomes object, data becomes material, memory becomes something that can be shaped and reworked. The work exists in a state of movement, resisting singular definition. This is not a departure from photography, but an expansion of it. A way of thinking that reflects a world where identities, technologies, and narratives are increasingly layered and interconnected. Within this expanded field, the photograph continues to travel - across media, across disciplines, across memory and imagination. It invites collaboration, experimentation, and transformation. To look is no longer enough; the image asks to be engaged, translated, remade, rethought. Related work: V.I.R.A.L, A SIMPLER LIFE and AN ULTRASTRUCTURE OF BRITAIN https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/1668687167127-NI61FDKS0HFAINBNVGC4/Carnation+66+Raki+Nikahetiya.jpg ESSAYS - on PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVES London / Delhi / Colombo, ongoing A photographic negative. It feels as it’s not simply an inversion; it is a disruption of how the world is seen. Dark becomes light, light becomes dark. In colour negatives, blue shifts to yellow, green to magenta, red to cyan. The familiar reorganises itself into an alternate spectrum - a counter-image that challenges what is taken for granted. Within this practice, the negative functions not as a step toward a final image, but as a way of seeing otherwise. By reversing colour and contrast, it unsettles habitual perception and draws attention to the constructed nature of the visible. What appears stable begins to shift. What once seemed immediate becomes strange, requiring time to be understood. In a world saturated with images - produced, consumed, and forgotten at speed - the negative resists immediacy. It interrupts recognition. It asks for a pause, a moment of adjustment, where seeing becomes active rather than automatic. As Vilém Flusser suggests, images are not neutral reflections but coded surfaces shaped by systems of perception and interpretation; the negative makes this visible by exposing the instability beneath what appears fixed. The negative also carries a sense of latency. It exists as an image in waiting - both complete and unresolved. It suggests potential rather than closure, holding within it multiple possibilities of translation. In this way, it becomes less a representation and more a field of transformation, where absence can register as presence, and the unseen begins to surface. Inverting the image becomes a way of questioning not only form, but attention. What is usually overlooked? What recedes into background or becomes visual noise? The negative does not provide answers; instead, it destabilises the frame through which the world is interpreted, opening space for alternative readings of image, subject, and reality. Across positive and negative, image and afterimage, the work returns to a central concern: how perception shapes meaning. Every image contains both what is visible and what is suppressed. By shifting perspective, the possibility emerges to notice what has always been present, but rarely seen. Related work: IN CARNATIONS and POSSIBILITIES https://www.rakiography.com/raki-nikahetiya daily 1.0 2026-04-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/2f0a350d-456e-4b71-9f31-5d185cf7f49b/DSC07981.png ∞ https://www.rakiography.com/contact daily 0.75 2026-04-01 https://www.rakiography.com/bio daily 0.75 2026-04-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/508bd483e4b0b3e60efdb311/f9678028-8a66-4308-ae7d-b36888596195/Image+credit%3A+Rebecca+Mansell BIO - Make it stand out Image credit: Rebecca Mansell