Volte Art Projects is presenting The Guernica Project by multidisciplinary artist and storyteller Rahgava KK from 16 February to 16 April 2022.
Presented in the main space of Volte Art Projects’ Alserkal Avenue gallery, Raghava’s 2021 work, entitled Guernica for the Siri-ocene, is a monumental 3.5 x 8 meter long painting that marries a wide range of inspirations, including the artist’s personal research, his encounter with Picasso’s original 1937 masterpiece, and a broad spectrum of his lived experiences. For this phygital project, Raghava KK draws on his wealth of digital experience that garnered him a record-breaking, $94,500 NFT sale at Sotheby’s last year.
A constantly growing series, The Guernica Project comprises paintings, digital prints, and a large selection of NFTs which retell Indian history through cartoon characters and memes. Harnessing the historical and the über-contemporary, Raghava tells a captivating story that rejects the binary classifications of conflict and harmony.
The gallery will present Raghava’s painting alongside prints of 69 NFT works created based on characters from the painting. Additionally, a screen-based iteration of The Guernica Project will be on show at Volte Art Projects’ booth at the inaugural digital section of Art Dubai 2022, hosted at Madinat Jumeirah between 11 – 13 March 2022.
About Raghava KK
Raghava KK has pioneered a ground-breaking body of diverse works that explore transcendence through the lens of the current digital era. Featured on CNN’s list of ten fascinating thinkers, authors and provocateurs in 2010, Raghava’s work traverses traditional forms of painting, installation and performance, while his practice embraces new media (artificial intelligence, neuro-feedback, biohacking, board and video games, crypto currencies etc), to express post-human contemporary realities. His lectures, including 5 TED talks, are known for inspiring audiences to expand their social and psychological selves, using art. Last year, Netflix launched an episode on Raghava in the Creative Indians Series.
Raghava’s storytelling migrates among his various disciplines through 50 foot live paintings, interactive books on Apple’s iPad (Pop-it, won a Kirkus book award and won best of Singapore Art Fair), music inspired art for Erykah Badu and Paul Simon, as creator in residence at Viacom, NY, Raghava premiered Must# at both TED and Viacom HQ, A Visual Empathy Algorithm that learned how the viewer made meaning visually and pushed him to transcend the limits of his taste.
Raghava co-founded and chaired The INK Fellowship (The TED of India), India’s leading global multidisciplinary fellowship program in 2010. Raghava was inducted into the National Geographic Society in 2013 as an Explorer, for pushing the boundaries of scientific exploration through art.
In 2015, he created a new compositional process, part human and part algorithm-driven through his collaborative project SOZO – a painting machine, developed for him by Artmatr, an offshoot of the MIT Media lab. In 2017, Raghava was invited by Jeff Bezos to conduct an art workshop for leading creative minds from around the world. The same year, as a partner, he helped set up the vision and strategy for India’s largest venture fund for wellbeing.
Raghava co-founded 64/1 in 2018, an art collective dedicated to blurring the lines between art, art criticism and art education. In 2021, Raghava was the first Indian artist to launch an NFT at Sotheby’s, New York in partnership with BurningMan – a collaborative artwork created using brainwaves, AI and painting robots at Boundless Space. Raghava also worked on a collaborative AI art piece created with Harshit Agrawal and 64/1 entitled Strange Genders; this piece was longlisted for the Lumen Prize 2021.
Raghava KK currently lives and works out of New York and Bangalore.
