When: Thursday 15 August, 6 - 7PM
Where: Primary, Studio A4
Booking: Advance booking is essential. Book here.
Join London based South Asian artist Madi Acharya-Baskerville, her works and South-Indian migrant artist-curator Raghavi Chinnadurai for an enactment of conversation/performance. During August, Madi is in residence at Primary as part of our Work in Common series, that encourages artists to experiment with different ways of working – either testing out a speculative idea or developing new collaborations. As an extension of Madi’s process of working with pre-existing objects, materials and Raghavi’s research in decolonial methodologies, Madi will take the voice of their artwork and the conversation will happen between the curator and the artwork, unfolding as a performance.
Trophy Bird. Mixed Media Sculpture. Found plastic, bone, vintage textiles, found wood, acrylic paint. Photo by Chris Honeywell
Bios:
Madi Acharya-Baskerville is a London based South Asian artist. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art at University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. She has exhibited widely within the UK and abroad. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Whitworth, Manchester and was on display in ‘Exchanges: Recent Additions to the Collection’ (2021-2022).
She has been awarded DYCP Grant from Arts Council England (2021-22) for developing her practice in the context of museum collections. She has been selected for the 20/20 residency commission, supported by University of the Arts London, Decolonizing Institute (2022) and has been artist in residence at The Lightbox, Woking as part of this. Her solo exhibition ‘I Dream a Palace’ at the Lightbox, (2024) showcases works created during the 20/20 residency.
She has won the First Plinth Award, Royal Society of Sculptors (2023). She has recently completed her first Public Art Commission and has sculpture ‘The Double Act’ has been on display at the Royal Society of Sculptors and is currently on show at The Art House, Wakefield. As part of the Public Art Award she also had a recent solo exhibition at the Royal Society of Sculptors. She has received The Primary Residency Prize following selection for New Art Exchange Open (2023). Her work also featured in ‘Fragments of Our Time’, Whitaker Museum as part of British Textile Biennial and ‘Stuff of Life/ Life of Stuff’ Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2023).
Madi Acharya-Baskerville | Work In Common is part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
Raghavi Chinnadurai
Raghavi Chinnadurai is a Tamil interdisciplinary practitioner, an artist-curator from Thanjavur, TamilNadu, India.
She is currently Associate Curator at Primary.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 under-privileged low-income households. 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
Access:
This event will take place in Studio A4 which has level access from our main entrance. Please email admin@weareprimary.org or call 0115 924 4493 with any access inquiries.