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Curating Contemporary Art (MA)

Raghavi Chinnadurai

Home: A Domestic Fiction 

Our project proposal, titled Home: A Domestic Fiction, aims to challenge the logocentric modes of curatorial communication and explore a non-hierarchical process of care in which artwork, artist and audience are situated as equal. Understanding the groups that we exist in to be both intentional and unintentional, we see ourselves as an “Unintentional Collective” as a model for rethinking social relations.  


Responding to a brief from Delfina Foundation as the Unintentional Collective, we have developed a card game designed to explore the complexities and multiplicities of the idea of ‘home’ within our globalised world. Giving agency to the personal histories of participants, a complex, intricate network of narratives can be built through gameplay, out of which a live archive of what may constitute a ‘home’ develops as new cards are added to the pack. We have commissioned artists David Blandy and April Lin to design the first two sets of five cards. Through this potentially ever-expanding card deck, the geographic rigidity that the notion of ‘home’ can evoke is challenged, and its ephemerality and temporality are highlighted. We seek to understand how a home is constructed through transient relationships and experiences. 


Our presentation displays the commissioned sets of cards, inviting the audience to explore and respond to the archive produced through playing the game. In an accompanying live event, an improvised sound performance by Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock, that uses the archive as score, delves deeper into non-logocentric modes of (re)collection. 

Degree Details

School of Arts & HumanitiesCurating Contemporary Art (MA) RCA2023 at Battersea and Kensington

RCA Battersea, Studio Building, First floor

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Once upon a time (o1991) at Thanjavur, India, was born Raghavi Chinnadurai, a Tamizh womxn interdisciplinary practitioner, an artist- curator. As a creative practitioner, she aims to build sustainable social ecosystems, bringing together public and contemporary art together through interdependent research driven mediation within her local community. She creates ethnographic, auto-ethnographic, and folklorish narratives, to critically challenge, reclaim and recalibrate the moral in contemporary Tamizh collective conscience. Her practice ranges across painting, sculpture, installation, poetry, yoga and curating. Though diverse, research, practice, creation, curation all converge into creating a fictional universe, where programmes and exhibitions are treated as play and artworks collectively referred as ‘adult toys’. The play and toys, aim to resurface and question the viewers sub-conscience surrounding childhood visual memory and associated beliefs on gender, social and racial oppressions within Tamil community and diaspora.

Her manifestly diverse range of material practice is informed by the plurality of the Hindu religious sensibility and mythology she grew up amongst. Through the process of World making, she acts as a cultural archeologist, dissecting and analysing the contemporaneity in the context of post-colonial, capitalistic, Tamizh socio-political culture, facilitating discourse, dialogues, actions, activities, ecosystems around cross-cultural collective Identity and self-Identity. She is I

RCA- Logitech Scholarship