Raghava KK

Raghava KK’s multidisciplinary artworks can be seen as a gesture of his larger than life personality. His work transcends the binaries of local/global and digital/material. He is the embodiment of the New India's global and digital aspirations.

Raghava KK has pioneered a groundbreaking 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. A few years ago, 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 that year), 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 has mentored several creative entrepreneurs by infusing his philosophy into their processes and products. In 2010, Raghava co-founded and chaired The INK Fellowship (The TED of India), India’s leading global multidisciplinary fellowship program. 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.

In 2018, Raghava co-founded 64/1, an art collective dedicated to blurring the lines between art, art criticism and art education.
In 2020, Raghava created Eye Candy - a performance art piece on Instagram (with Under25 studios) in an attempt to reach out to a completely different audience, than the usual one for high art, through a completely different art form that combines monologue, painting and self-help.

In 2021, Raghava was the first Indian 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 (Karthik Kalyanaraman and Raghava KK - an art collective dedicated to blurring the lines between art, art criticism and art education) called Strange Genders was exhibited at Exostential - an AI art show at Emami Art Foundation, Kolkata. The artwork was longlisted for the Lumen Prize 2021.

In 2022, Raghava was a part of Hub India at Artissima in Milan, Italy. Later that year, Volte Art Projects launched Raghava’s Guernica Project in Dubai.
Raghava just launched his latest series, The Impossible Bouquet 2023 at the Gujral Foundation in New Delhi. In this series, in conversation with AI, Raghava explores the rapidly changing tools of digital image making as the possibility for a new genre: artworks creatively produced by the extended dialogue of man and machine.

He currently lives and works out of New York, Dubai and Bangalore, India and is represented by Volte Art Projects globally.