TITLE: Bounded as Follows

The series explores a memory of collective heritage in Sri Lanka. Island life with a complex layer of social norms and caste-based expectations. Expectations which can lead to pressure and tension. Facades built around individual lives and lifestyles helped protecting oneself from unfair judgement, as the urge to appear perfect, to preserve an image, a status, a name was seen as all important.

These photographs of endemic and exotic plants in my ancestral garden portrait a similar facade of perfection. Stylised, yet disconnected from its surroundings and itself. We do not see what is behind the floral spectacle – the stories and images remain concealed, pressed firmly into the backdrop of the night.

AUTHOR: Raki Nikahetiya (India)

Born in Sri Lanka in 1983, Raki Nikahetiya and his parents left the country during times of civil war. They moved to Austria, and reality ruptured between two cultural poles. He studied Economics in Vienna.

During a university exchange in the Netherlands in 2006, the binary was broken and a delicious new reality prevailed. He visited a flea market and got his first camera. 55 Euros. Kodak. Simple and digital. Back in Vienna, Raki started off as a journalist. After a five year posting at the United Nations, with a cache of experience in international development work, he moved to London in 2013. He worked in trade development and environmental conservation in Asia and Africa before fully focussing on his art practice in 2019.

Raki now lives in New Delhi, India and exhibits his work internationally. He splits his art practice into photography and interdisciplinary contemporary art, often with a focus on photographic negatives. Raki’s art is a process he describes as “the continuous search for the subtle and unseen.”