Raghavi Chinnadurai

Associate Curator

Raghavi is a Tamil womxn interdisciplinary practitioner, an artist-curator from Thanjavur, TamilNadu, India. As a creative practitioner, she aims to build sustainable social ecosystems, bringing local community and contemporary art together through interdependent research-driven mediation. She tries to critically challenge, reclaim and recalibrate the moral in contemporary Tamil collective conscience.

Her practice encompasses  painting, sculpture, installation, poetry, yoga and curating. Through the process of world-making, she acts as a cultural archeologist, dissecting and analysing contemporaneity in the context of post-colonial, capitalistic, Tamil socio-political culture, facilitating discourse, actions, and ecosystems. As a curator, she is especially interested in working with women and young artists from Tamil diaspora, and exploring play and gamification as methodologies to activate exhibitory spaces.

Raghavi’s long term projects include Punchmittai, an experimental art studio, based in Thanjavur, India, trying to bring art to the public through innovative curatorial frameworks, merchandising, workshops, and collaborations. She has interned with DakshinaChitra Heritage Museum, Chennai, as a museum management intern during 2020-2021. She has worked as design mentor, with Lead by Design, Chennai, for girls aged eight to fourteen years old from marginalised community. She has co-founded an independent women’s online magazine, PennDiagram, publishing Tamil women's perspectives on current transnational socio-political contexts and its impacts on them. 

Raghavi completed her MA in Curating Contemporary Art at Royal College of Art, London as a RCA-Logitech Scholar. Her current research interest focuses on exploring the pedagogical possibilities of Kolam, indigenous South-Indian Tamil threshold design, and other embedded cultural practices in the Tamil community, as decolonial curatorial frameworks and methodologies. This research aims to explore how the marginalisation of kolam, particularly in  eurocentric art history that frames vernacular designs through a historiographic, anthropologic lens, could explain the lack of Tamil Contemporary art in the global art market. It also tries to formulate new non-eurocentric curatorial and exhibitory methodologies, rooted in collaboration and co-creation, which could facilitate Tamil contemporary art, especially by women and young artists. During her time in Primary, she will try to implement different forms of this research, facilitating sustainable dialogue and discourse on these concerns.