The Game Changer

“Exquisite Cadaver is a series of artwork that has resulted from a recent diasporic dilemma. I perform many roles—artist,Indian,American,father,husband,parent,child,student,teacher,even within the art world,I am a thinker,philosopher,ingénue,and also a seller of beauty,businessman and politician. So fragmented is my identity that I find it rather caricatured to identify with any one predominant role,” says the Bangalore-born artist. He is a self-taught,multi-disciplinary artist who works in genres as disparate as iPad Art,painting,film,installation,multimedia and performance.

To showcase his ideas of complexity of human identities and fragmented selves,he has used history as a tool and Exquisite Cadaver,a 19th century parlour game which he used to play in the school,as the medium. In this game,also referred to as ‘Exquisite Corpse’,a sentence is constructed by a group as a paper is passed around the circle. Each contributor can see only the most recent piece of what has been written.

Interestingly till not so long ago,Raghava hated history,unlike his wife Netra Srikanth. “I used to tell Netra that you live in the past and I in the future,” says the 31-year-old. This teasing stopped after Srikanth — who did her masters in History from the University of California and now teaches in New York Public School — made him realise that history throws up multiple perceptions. “The same historical event can be interpreted differently by different people. This creates different identities,” he says. This became his theme for his third solo exhibition at Mumbai’s Art Musing that is on till November 30. Following the rules of ‘Exquisite Cadaver’,Raghava first painted the top section of all the paintings currently on display. After some days,he painted their middle part while keeping the top half hidden. The full view of his paintings of this series was revealed only after he painted the bottom part using the same method.

“Each painting,when completed,came as a surprise,” he says. These images of “effective chaos” as shown in A Gallery of Adorable Boundaries,Disciplined by Cleo,Preferred to the Shadow and others explain a human mind better. “This shows nothing is in control,” says Raghava,who was named as one of the 10 most fascinating people the world is yet to know of by CNN. Incidentally,almost all the paintings were sold even before the exhibition opened.

According to the Brooklyn-based artist,history is an inadequate form of record-keeping. It is rather a fabulous imaging tool. “In these works,I present an approach to history that I feel better represents the fragmented self,” he says. He also creates mythological characters,borrows from traditions,and his memory.

True to this philosophy,he has Mahatma Gandhi depicted as “a great mobiliser” in a painting titled Safety Belt for the Census Bureau and the ecological impact of Jawaharlal Nehru’s industrial policy in 24:00. “Add this photo

to your map”—reads another

suggestion from Raghava pasted amid his paintings. This instruction most visitors must have

followed unconsciously as the artist presents images of “fragmented selves”.