RAGHAVI CHINNADURAI

She/ They

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is a woman interdisciplinary artist-curator–researcher from Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, working through the intertwined practices of feminist craft, decolonial curating, migrant world-making, and counter-archiving. My work centres the body as archive, drawing from oral whispers, domestic repetitions, the frictions of folded sarees, embodied wisdom, and other peripheral sites of knowledge held within women’s everyday lives.

SCRAPBOOK

Working across curation, installation, painting, writing, yoga, and community-led research, my practice brings together embodied, ethnographic, and autoethnographic methods, building transnational, collaborative ecosystems that foreground marginalised archives, challenge dominant narratives, and expand how women’s invisible labour, knowledge, and world-making practices are understood within contemporary cultural production—softening and blurring the boundaries between domestic ritual, art, and craft.

raghavi1991@gmail.com
Instagram

CV

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ACADEMIC
2022-23 Royal College of Art, London, Curating Contemporary Art MA ( Logitech Scholar)

Royal College of Art, London, Graduate Diploma, Humanities, Distinction

University of Oxford, Distance Education, Indian Art, Online

University of Oxford, Distance Education, Learning to Look at Modern Art, Online. 

Certificate IV in Design, RMIT, Melbourne

B.Tech, Biotechnology, SVCE, Chennai 

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EXPERIENCE 2025–ongoing
kolam.ephemeral, Transnational intersectional curatorial research unit — Research Lead / Curator

2024–2025
Associate Curator, Primary


2016–2025
Founder / Curator, Punchmittai (Experimental studio engaging with contemporary Tamil art and aesthetics)

2022
Retail Assistant, Natural History Museum

2021
Museum Management Intern, DakshinChitra Heritage Museum
Assisted across Curation, Painting & Textile Conservation, Hospitality & Tourism, Finance, Publicity, and Library.

2020
Writer / Illustrator, Penndiagram
Independent online magazine publishing South Indian women’s perspectives on transitional socio-politics.

2020
Writer / Illustrator, Pyxis

2019
Gallery Intern, Apparao Gallery

2019
Art & Design Mentor, Lead by Design
Volunteered as mentor for girls (Grades 4–8) from underprivileged background, guiding them through design-led problem solving.

2017
Community Engagement Officer, Heritage Inspired Involved in the research and development of the project,
Co-developed a community performance piece that activated the local art ecosystem

2016
Social Media Manager & Curatorial Lead, SilkAura
Handled showcasing and marketing of handloom sarees from local weaving pockets of India.

2015
Art Co-teacher, Vaels Billabong International School

2013
Cognizant Technology Solutions

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PROJECTS2025 
Kolam, an Art Fund–supported project at Primary, Nottingham developed through sustained collaboration with the Nottingham Tamil diasporic community and photographers and practitioners from Tamil Nadu, evolving into an exhibition and multi-format public programme.

2023
Partnering with Delfina Foundation, project Home under construction,RCA degree show, London. More>

2023
Quantum Noise, Public programme, RCA

2023
Games and Playing as neo-liberal rituals, research based public programme, RCA (curatorial)

2023
Elements, Ceramics and Glasses WIP show, RCA (curatorial)

2022
Cast a Shadow, Group Exhibition, SafeHouse, London

2021
What a Waste, The Koppel Project (artist)

2021
‘The Other Side of Life’ Exhibition, DakshinaChitra Museum, Chennai (curatorial)

2021
Exhibited installation and sculpture at Kadambari gallery, Chennai (artist)

2020
Associated with Aaval Postcard Project, Almaari

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ONGOING PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH
2023–Present
Dear Sita; Long-term oral and performative research treating women’s unfulfilled wishes as a starting point for understanding wellbeing and everyday health in Tamil diasporic life.

2024–Present
DIY Anarchist Bodies. Curatorial archival interventions in British Museum collections examining borders, patriarchy and women’s embodied autonomy within colonial visual systems.

2021–Present
Kolam. Ongoing curatorial research exploring Tamil threshold art to frame new curatorial methodologies addressing transnational, intersectional social justice.

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WORKSHOPS
2024–25
Designed and delivered a multi-format programme of workshops, photo-walks and in-conversation events as part of the Kolam exhibition, collaborating with feminist performers, marginalised artists, writers, local community groups and the Tamil diasporic community. The programme explored identity, care, labour, caste consciousness, migrant and diasporic experience, environment and community well-being through collective making and critical dialogue.


2024–25
Collaboration with Nottingham Tamil Kuzhumam (NTK) — Worked with young Tamil diasporic children aged 5–14 to explore migration, identity and well-being through creative practice, including filmmaking, animation, zine-making and material-led workshops.

2023
Cooking as a co-curatorial method building community, RCA

2017–2021
Series of art-building workshops online and at various sites in Chennai, India, as facilitative framework to promote and instigate creativity within Tamil public.

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WRITING2025
Kolam notebook – Rethinking Curatorial patterns from the Margins

2024
Dead fish to Flying Bird – Relational patterning and Decolonial Readings of Women’s Labour and Care

2023
Hypothetical Interview with Kohinoor – Animism as a methodology, developing curatorial frameworks

2023
“Crimes of empire/crimes of empire” – An exploration of Western encyclopedic museum’s colonial legacy

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PROJECT

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Kolam (2024–2025)
Exhibition & Research at Primary, Nottingham

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Kolam is a curatorial exhibition and research project presented at Primary, Nottingham, from November 2024 to February 2025. Developed through my role as Associate Curator (April 2024–November 2025), supported by Art Fund, the project uses the Tamil threshold practice of Kolam to ask how everyday, gendered, and caste-marked forms of making can reshape contemporary curatorial methods.

Located within Nottingham’s cultural and Tamil community networks, Kolam explores questions of thresholds, feminist labour, and decolonial exhibition-making, working across workshops, community contributions, and interdisciplinary artistic practices.
EXHIBITION
EVENTS
WALKTHROUGH
ZINE

Relevant Writings:

2025
Kolam notebook – Rethinking Curatorial patterns from the Margins

2024
Dead fish to Flying Bird – Relational patterning and Decolonial Readings of Women’s Labour and Care






Credit: Kolam, Primary, Nottingham 2024. Photographic works by Palani Kumar, Hairunisha Kasim-Moulana, People's Photographers Archive/ People's Archive of Rural India. Image Credit: Rae Dowling

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Dear Sita(2020-Ongoing)

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This work does not critique faith or belief. Instead, it examines how mythological narratives organise gendered expectations within Tamil domestic life and how these narrative structures continue to shape women’s wellbeing. The reference to Sita is not a critique of her as a figure, but a way of tracing how patriarchal systems mobilise such narratives to script women into positions of intra-gender scrutiny, revealing the structural logics that distribute compliance, discipline, and vulnerability unevenly across women’s lives—producing conditions of simultaneous villainisation and victimisation within the same system.

Click for the oral archives
Dear Sita is an interdisciplinary project that examines the Sita Syndrome, the moral narrative of endurance, sacrifice and ideal womanhood that continues to shape Tamil women’s autonomy, emotional possibility and wellbeing. My role shifts between artist, curator and researcher, responding to the ethical demands of intergenerational oral histories and the positionality of being a migrant Tamil woman.

The project began with intimate conversations with my mother and grandmother. Their unfulfilled wishes, such as a denied fifty kilometre trip at seventeen and an interrupted education at twelve, became the first entries in an expanding oral archive. As the dialogue grew to include women in my maternal community, everyday desires such as learning to cycle, walking alone, buying bangles or simply running freely in a public park revealed systemic patterns of gendered restriction, psychological wellbeing and social capital. My mother once described watching an actress jog joyfully in early morning light, wearing clothes she herself was never allowed to wear, and wishing she could inhabit that freedom even for a moment. The GIF created in response to this memory acts as a small activation, a visual enactment of a desire withheld.

When mapped collectively, these seemingly modest wishes expose broader structural undercurrents around freedom, mobility, emotional safety and bodily autonomy. Drawing on Sharmila Rege’s work on Dalit women’s testimonies and Bhoomika Saraswati’s writing on caste, climate precarity and labour, the project reframes these desires not as anecdotes but as indicators of embodied health and structural inequality. Its methodology centres oral listening, iterative mapping and narrative co authorship, refusing extractive ethnographic modes.

Dear Sita will be further developed within Kolam.ephemeral as a community led Day of Wishes, where women enact a previously denied everyday wish as a collective act of nourishment, repair and embodied wellbeing. This activation will evolve into a cooperative wellbeing forum bringing together women, ecologists and care practitioners to discuss long term psychological safety, intergenerational thriving and community led health practices.




 

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DIY- Anarchist Bodies( 2024-Ongoing)

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The project has developed through a sustained curatorial inquiry into the British Museum’s Digital Archive, working across shifting keywords and metadata trails to analyse not only what is archived but how it is archived — who is named, who remains unnamed, which provinces are indexed, which bodies are made visible, and how objects and images are framed, described, and institutionally narrated.


DIY ANARCHIST ARCHIVE interrogates the colonial photograph as a structuring instrument of knowledge, one that has historically shaped bodies and landscapes through institutional authority. Susan Sontag’s claim that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed” (On Photography, 1977) becomes a point of tension—revealing how archives have used photography to secure meaning, ownership, and circulation. Through a sustained curatorial inquiry into the British Museum’s Digital Archive—reading through keywords, provinces, metadata, naming practices, and descriptive conventions—the project examines not only what is collected, but how visibility is produced.

This work asks: How might familial memory and embodied gestures disrupt what colonial archives present as truth? Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” opens a critical recognition that these images are not neutral witnesses but constructs.

Five entry points structure the project:

1. Hands that weave time: Hands from Tamil domestic images and restricted Museum holdings reassert embodied knowledge where the archive erases specificity.
2. Crossing Borders Domestic and national borders emerge as parallel architectures of friction, mobility regulation, and patriarchal–colonial authority.
3. 
   Paradox of Pattammal: Familial histories of domestic violence expose the entanglement between colonial representation and intimate hierarchy exaimed through Thanjavur colony painting
   
4. 
   Thanjavur Almirah: British-held objects re-situated in Thanjavur domestic spaces challenge institutional custodianship.
   
5. 
   Embodied Cartographies: My personal engagement with nudity—contrasted with colonial and canonical nudes—reveals racialised hierarchies of visibility, naming, and value.
   

Across these strands, “poor images”—in dialogue with critical media thinking articulated by Hito Steyerl (“In Defense of the Poor Image,” 2009)—deploy degradation, incompleteness, and DIY reanimation to unsettle archival authority.

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