Raki Nikahetiya's photographic artwork is a split into documentary work and interdisciplinary exploration using the camera as the main medium to capture new "findings". He is self-taught in documentary photography but started his interdisciplinary path after completing a foundation course at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Both practices are intertwined; as an artist with a migrant background, the documentary aspect focuses on the individual as well as collective heritage and cultural identity. The interdisciplinary work involves the creation and portrayal of fictional worlds through photographic negatives, handmade sculptures, structures, and unnatural rearrangement of objects. A process Raki sees as an attempt to question our reality and the continuous search for the unseen.

www.rakiography.com

@rakiography

Artist biography

Born in Sri Lanka in 1983, he left the country with his parents during times of civil war. They moved to Austria, and reality ruptured between two cultural poles. Raki studied Economics in Vienna, and during a university exchange in the Netherlands, the binary was broken, and a delicious new reality prevailed. He visited a flea market and got his first camera – this was the beginning of his life-long passion with this medium. Back in Vienna, Raki Nikahetiya started as a photojournalist. After a five year posting at the United Nations, with a cache of experience in international development work, he moved to London in 2013. There he continued working for trade development and environmental conservation in Asia and Africa before he entirely focussed on his art practice in 2019. Raki now lives in New Delhi, India, and splits his work into traditional documentary and experimental interdisciplinary photography.

Possibilities

A 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube. Invented by Ernő Rubik in the 1970s, this three-dimensional sphere remains one of the most loved puzzles of the 21st century. An iconic object of our time.

The ultimate aim of solving this puzzle is to rotate the cube until each side is in a single color. A 3x3x3 cube consists of six faces, each with nine colored square facets and 54 facets. As such every single cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 or 43 quintillion possible combinations. A higher number than galaxies in the observable universe. Yet it is solvable in less than ten seconds if you know how.

Exploring possibilities so incredibly vast, this series of photographic negatives questions individual and collective choice, the power of action, and what impact this has once a course of action unfurls from present to future. The work ultimately seeks to question why we accept and often desire one supreme outcome, and reality vis-a-vis a multitude of possibilities.

Rubik’s Cube® used by permission of Rubik’s Brand Ltd. www.rubiks.com

"A photographic negative is the total inversion of an image. Dark areas seem light, and light areas seem dark. A negative of a color image becomes a curious, backward kaleidoscope: Blues appear yellow, greens appear magenta, reds appear cyan, and vice versa. Colour subverts itself, into a blueprint of reality.

Raki uses negatives as a tool to question our understanding of our environment – subjects, objects, and spaces we see every day, without registering other parallel dimensions.

The information age has led to a change of our attentional behaviors and the way we absorb visual information. This work demands you take a step back in the era of image overload and sensorial overstimulation. To question why and how we notice things, process the world around us and what we accept as reality.

In positive or negative, the seen and unseen is transformed; forever a blueprint determined by the individual's perception."