Rakiography

12/10/2026

What does it take to build an art biennale that gives back more than it takes, at the highest point in the world? For the first Good Life Xperience, we go beneath the sā Ladakh Biennale 2026 with its Co-Founder Raki Nikahetiya to understand how landscape, community and the arts came together through a regenerative model. Small room, intimate conversation, real learning.

20 October 2026 · 6pm · Good Life X, Trace Expert City, Maradana

Good Life Xperiences is a series of small-room salons and immersive sessions that opens up eight years of hard-won knowledge and networks on how South Asia can move from extraction to regeneration. Together, we explore answers to the question: what does it take to live a good life in South Asia?

Xperience it with us.

Free to attend, Save your Seat. Link in Bio

07/10/2026

What is a nation?

What constitutes a nation when its histories are encountered not through monuments, borders or political narratives, but through matter?

A five-year investigation began following a relocation to the United Kingdom in 2014, spanning more than thirty historically significant sites. Minute samples of natural and human-made materials were collected, from plant matter found along the Norfolk coast, near the earliest known human footprints outside of Africa, dating to approximately 800,000 years ago and revealed following a storm, to corroded metal gathered at the world’s first iron bridge in Shropshire.

Coated in gold dust, the samples were examined using a scanning electron microscope at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi. Magnified beyond ordinary perception, their immediate historical identities dissolve. What emerges instead are surfaces, particles, structures and traces: matter shaped by geological time, human presence and processes of transformation.

At this scale, distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the ancient and the contemporary, become uncertain. History appears not as something monumental or fixed, but as something embedded in the physical world.

The series considers nationhood as a material condition, locating questions of identity, heritage and belonging within the fragments through which places are formed and remembered. Seemingly negligible matter becomes a means of tracing time, connecting the intimate scale of a fragment with the expansive and often abstract idea of a nation.

All images were produced at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, with support from King’s College London. The series was shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society International Exhibition 2021 and the IPE163 Award.

Image: KALĀ South Asia, 2024

Site Visit (2016). Richborough, Kent - the first Roman Fort in the Great Britain.

Institute of Technology New Delhi, 2020. Gold-coated samples of soil and found objects at various sites prior to Electron-Microscope imaging.

IRONBRIDGE I
1781 AD. A metal rust sample taken near the Iron Bridge, Shropshire – often arguably titled the Birthplace of the Industr

03/10/2026

🌱🐕

26/09/2026

Early works with Austrian Cultural Forum New Delhi 🇦🇹
Austrian Embassy New Delhi

"A Simpler Life explores memory, belonging, and migration through portraits drawn from the artist’s family photographs in Sri Lanka. Images of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents are first translated through painting and then reconstituted in silk thread, where lines dissolve into stitches, surfaces acquire relief, and photographic fragments become tactile objects. Made in collaboration with embroiderer Reyas Ali in Kolkata, each work records the slow passage of the image through hand, fabric, and thread, transforming recollection into something that can be touched and inhabited. Symbolic objects embedded within the portraits further connect intimate memories to questions of inheritance, lineage, and displacement. Drawing on Sri Lankan embroidery traditions associated with the recording of family and heritage, the series treats thread as both image and archive, revealing memory as a material process - layered, fragile, and continually remade through distance, loss, and return."

LOKU ATTHAMMA
2021
Raki Nikahetiya
Hand-embroidery on pure silk
100 x 100 x 5 CM
[Sold]

26/09/2026

Raki Nikahetiya | HENI News Profile

Your source for daily art news and insights. Analyse data-rich auction reports, uncover trends, and explore trending artists shaping the global art market.

22/09/2026

Self portrait
ca 1992
Raki Nikahetiya
Oil pastels on paper
26x37cm
2026

20/09/2026

"I was born in New Zealand in 1972. My father was also born in New Zealand, but his parents were originally from Croatia, specifically the Dalmatian coast. They settled in a region of the North Island where many Croatians immigrated during the 1800’s and again in the 1930s and 1940s (my grandparents). These Croatian immigrants were commonly referred to as "Deli’s" (short for Dalmatians).

On my mother’s side, I have Māori heritage through her mother, while her father - like my father's parents - was a Croatian from the Dalmatia region. The Māori had their own nickname for Croatians: "Tarara," a playful reference to the “fast-paced” way they spoke. I come from a proud and rich lineage on both sides of my family, and that heritage is something I carry with great pride."

Simone Pirovich

FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS, 2025, by Raki Nikahetiya, brings together soil, sound, photography, embroidery and personal artefacts to explore belonging as something carried through memory, material and place. Centred on the stories and voices of eight individuals whose lives have been shaped by movement, refuge and settlement, the work traces personal and ancestral histories across geographies and generations, considering how experiences of place, memory and belonging endure beyond written record.

Supported by the Fremantle Biennale and Mary Harrison Hill. All embroidery works in collaboration with Reyas Ali.

11/09/2026

Unsaid
(Attha at home, ca 1954)
Raki Nikahetiya
Oil pastels on paper
26x37cm
2026

05/09/2026

Repost via colomboscope OPEN CALL: CROSS CURRENTS

Crosscurrents is a new cultural mentorship programme by Colomboscope, dedicated to early career cultural organisers, arts programmers and curators in Sri Lanka. Designed in collaboration with EUNIC Sri Lanka, this project aims to support emerging cultural professionals through peer-led learning, mentorship, and hands-on skill building.

Taking place from October 2026 to February 2027, the programme brings together a small group of six participants for an in-depth programme of in-person and online mentorship sessions, visits to cultural institutions and work environments, and opportunities to learn from experienced practitioners across the field. Participation in the programme is free of charge.

Designed to accommodate participants with part-time work or ongoing academic commitments, Crosscurrents calls for curiosity, commitment, and an interest in shaping the cultural landscape of Sri Lanka.

The programme will culminate in a collaborative public-facing project in 2027, developed with guidance from local mentors and the organising team.

📣 Applications are now open.
🔗 Apply via www.colomboscope.lk/crosscurrents
📅 Deadline: 11.59 pm on 10 September 2026

Looking forward to contributing to Cross Currents alongside fellow mentors and practitioners:

Adeela Suleman (Vasl Artists’ Association)
Asanka Jayasinghe (University of Visual and Performing Arts)
Asvajit Boyle and Nigel Perera (FOLD Media Collective)
Cécile Hoorelbeke (Alliance Française de Colombo)
Heshma Wignaraja (Chitrasena Dance Company)
Jonathan Edward (Independent Architectural Designer)
Jan Ramesh de Saram (Colomboscope and Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka)
Lojithan Ram (Mount Studio)
Mark Rappolt (ArtReview and Rubaiya Qatar)
Natasha Ginwala (Colomboscope)
Özge Ersoy (Asia Art Archive)
Prateek and Priyanka Raja (Experimenter)
Sophia Sansoni and Vindhya Attygalle (Barefoot Gallery)
Stefan Winkler (Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka)
Thilini Perera and Shanika Perera (Geoffrey Bawa Trust

01/09/2026

Unrefined, undefined.

Ballpoint on butter paper. Wax on cotton.