Rakiography

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Rakiography

Artist
www.rakiography.com

Director and Co-Founder sā Biennale
www.sabiennale.com They moved to Austria, and reality ruptured between two cultural poles.

Born in Sri Lanka in 1983, Raki Nikahetiya and his parents left the country during times of Born in Sri Lanka in 1983, Raki Nikahetiya and his parents left the country during times of civil war. He studied Economics in Vienna and started off as a journalist, before joining the United Nations in 2009. After a five year posting and a cache of experience in international development work, he moved to

London. He continued his engagement in trade development and environmental conservation in Asia and Africa before fully focussing on his art practice in 2019. Now based in the UK and in India, Raki splits his art into documentary photography and interdisciplinary exploration. He ventures into the worlds of anthropology, botany and cosmology, using the camera to capture new "findings". Self-taught in documentary photography he started his interdisciplinary path after completing a foundation course at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Both practices are intertwined; as an artist with a migrant background, the documentary aspect - In Monochrome and In Colour - focuses on individual as well as collective heritage, culture and identity. The Interdisciplinary work involves the creation and portrayal of fictional worlds through photographic negatives, land art, painting, sculpture and scientific experiments. Through this, Raki depicts interconnectivity and interdependency between different realms – and explores our understanding of what we accept as reality.

28/04/2026

What do we hold on to when the place we come from exists only in memory?

‘Black Box I" retraces the contours of memory as a way of returning and connecting with an idea of home. Working from old family photographs and objects the series reconstructs an intimate world of cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents - those who shaped the earliest sense of belonging.

The embroideries, realised in collaboration with Reyas Ali in Kolkata, India, embody a dialogue between personal narrative and collective craftsmanship.

BLACK BOX I, 2024
Aari and Zardozi silk and silver embroidery
280 × 280 CM

26/04/2026

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Repost: The sā Ladakh Biennale and the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art are pleased to share a landmark long-term partnership, establishing a sustained platform for exchange that connects Ladakh with a regional network of artists and ideas.

Structured as a multi-annual, process-driven collaboration, the initiative supports continuity, research, and mindful local engagement across the 2026, 2028, and 2030 editions, moving beyond exhibition cycles toward sustained presence.

Rooted in ecological awareness and community-led knowledge, the partnership will enable new works that respond to land and the fragile conditions of high-altitude environments. Artists will work in situ, developing practices that are regenerative, context-sensitive, and ethically grounded.

The collaboration begins with the 2026 edition, running August 1-10 and featuring Nepali artist Amrit Karki, whose practice will unfold in dialogue with the terrain - shaping new ways of seeing, sensing and inhabiting the Himalayan landscape.

Image 2: ‘Breathing through the stillness’, Photo by Sameer Tamrakar, Courtesy of Amrit Karki.

Image 4: Disko Valley Bike Park, Leh, Ladakh, 2023. Photo by Urgyan Skaldan.

Image 6: ‘River of Sweat’ by Anshu Singh, sā Ladakh, 2023, Disko Valley Bike Park. Photo by Raki Nikahetiya.

24/04/2026

"Time travels in one direction, memory another."*

Lokuattha (ca 1938), 2026
Oil pastels on paper
40 x 60 CM

*William Gibson

23/04/2026

🌌

21/04/2026

Reunion (ca 1947), 2026
Oil pastels on paper

18/04/2026

FOR A FIFTY MILLION YEARS (at 3600m), 2023

“Our histories have always been inseparable from the histories of our landscapes. Over the past fifty million years, the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates has given rise to an immense and still-forming superstructure - the highest, yet youngest, mountain range on Earth. To build with the visible matter of Ladakh’s soil is to engage directly with deep time: to trace contours of origin and belonging, to confront the scale of human (in)significance, and to consider what persists - or disappears - across geological epochs. It is also, more simply, to get breathless in the thin air, and to come away with dirt under one’s broken nails - reminded that thinking, like making, is never entirely abstract, but must be felt.” Raki Nikahetiya

This body of work situates human presence within the vast temporal register of the earth, where material becomes both witness and agent. Engaging soil as medium and archive, the works foreground processes of accumulation, erosion, and transformation that exceed individual memory while shaping collective identity. Positioned within a framework of regenerative art, the practice moves beyond representation toward re-seeing material and place - where making becomes an act of resourcefulness, low impact and re-alignment with ecological cycles.

In this interplay of the impermanent and the enduring, the work proposes landscape not as backdrop, but as a living system - one that records, absorbs, and regenerates - continually redefining the conditions of life and our fleeting place within it.

Rammed earth and construction debris
4 × 1.5 × 0.5 m
With support of et al

Supported by DMG, New Delhi at 2023

17/04/2026

Warakaulle, 2024
Silk Aari Hand Embroidery and Applique on Velvet
150 × 106CM
Raki Nikahetiya
In collaboration with Reyas Ali

16/04/2026

“I was five when we left. We did so by plane. That’s I think where I first saw an air safety card.”

Over time, a fleeting image of instruction and reassurance has evolved into an ongoing inquiry into memory, safety, and belonging. In this body of work, Nikahetiya transforms the air safety card - a universal symbol of protection amid uncertainty - into a site of personal reflection, where a child’s recollection expands into a meditation on displacement, the fragility of security, and the quiet rituals of departure.

Across painting, printing, collage, and weaving, the artist reconfigures this familiar iconography through material translation. Central is the use of pietra dura marble, developed in collaboration with Farhan Mohammad in Agra, India, where semi-precious stone is inlaid into marble with exacting precision. Historically associated with durability, devotion and ornament, the medium here holds transient imagery in a state of permanence, recasting the language of instruction as an enduring inquiry into material, and the conditions of belonging.

15/04/2026

FOREST I (2026)
Work in progress since 2019

13/04/2026

HAPPISBURGH I (2021)

800,000 BC. A plant matter sample at Happisburgh beach in Norfolk – the first fossilized hominid footprints in the UK, potentially belonging to Homo Antecessor and the oldest known hominid footprints outside Africa. Great Britain was connected to mainland Europe during that interglacial period.

Hahnemühle archival paper
60 × 60 CM

Part of series: AN ULTRASTRUCTURE OF BRITAIN (2014 - 2021)

What is a nation? How was it made, what is made of? Is it borders, culture, or something more elemental?

After moving to the UK in 2014, Nikahetiya explored this through material traces. Over five years, he visited thirty historically significant sites, collecting tiny samples - from plant matter near some of Britain’s earliest human footprints, locations of history altering battles and treaties, to corroded metal from early industrial landmarks.
Each sample was coated in gold and examined under a scanning electron microscope, revealing intricate, otherworldly landscapes at the nanoscale. Here, history appears without narrative - no politics, dynasties or identities, only matter shaped by time.

The work shifts how we see nationhood: not just as an idea, but as something physically composed of fragments where history happened that connect and disconnect land, people, and history.

All images were produced at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, with support from King’s College London. Shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society IPE Award.

10/04/2026

Lokuattha (ca 1948), 2026
Pastels on paper
18 x 25cm

29/03/2026

🌳

FOREST II is a Miyawaki pocket forest inspired grove, permantly planted in February 2026, composed of over 200 native trees and plants suited to Delhi’s semi-arid climate, conceived as a compact living ecosystem within an urban context. Dense, multi-layered planting enables rapid ecological succession, creating shade, moisture retention, and habitat within a small local footprint. The forest is enclosed by a sculptural boundary formed from ten tonnes or over 20000 individual pieces of reclaimed waste construction metal from Max Estates’ developments, redirecting industrial debris into a living and evolving ecological infrastructure.

FOREST II, 2026
Raki Nikahetiya
Construction waste, soil, native plant species
5 x 7 x 3.20m

For , commissioned by

With et al

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http://www.rakiography.com/

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