KAVERI RAINA

Raina’s paintings on burlap evoke the corporeality of past tales—both witnessed and imagined. She transforms the agrarian material into a diaphanous screen, layering acrylic with loose graphite, oil paint, and pastel. Abstracted forms drawn from personal experience and inherited histories reveal generations of dislocation, as her somatic memories intertwine with legends of creation and destruction.

In this new body of work, Raina reflects on her own journey—born in Delhi into a Kashmiri family and moving to the United States at the age of ten. The body of work draws inspiration from the mystic Kashmiri poet Lalleshwari (1320–1392), known as Lal Ded, who created the poetic style vatsun or Vakhs, meaning “speech.” Through Lal Ded’s Vakhs, Raina unearths a missing thread in a fragmented lineage, reconnecting with an obscured past. Raina pays homage to the fourteenth century Sufi poet whose message transcended cultural and religious boundaries while invoking her own complex ancestry. Her layered compositions become shifting landscapes where fragmented histories resurface, framing memory in motion.

The exhibition embarks on a journey through the interstices of inner consciousness, where time and personal introspection are invoked in both their material and transcendental forms within the works. Raina’s visual language charts new ways of rendering objects and figures as metaphors of productivity or potential destruction—suspended between realms, at once tactile and visceral—bearing residual inflections of a past that unravels like a silent rupture within the contours of memory and the body.

Kaveri Raina (b.1990; New Delhi, India) lives and works in New York, USA. Raina received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2016) and her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2011).

Select solo and group exhibitions include reflection as a witness, Casey Kaplan, New York, NY (2024); A soft place to land, MOCA Cleveland, OH (2023); Kaveri Raina and Coral Saucedo Lomelí: What Do You Remember About the Earth, Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY (2023); A Space for Monsters, Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2021); E/MERGE: Art of the Indian Diaspora, National Indo-American Museum, Lombard, IL (2021); and She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York, Gracie Mansion, New York, NY (2019), among others.