Alka Raghuram

Self-Portraits With Masks 2

Lot No# AB2029

Alka Raghuram
Self-Portraits With Masks 1, 2 & 3
Teawash with Ink on water color paper
18”X24” (each)
Signed: Thumb Impression on the Lower Right Corner on Mask 1, Thumb Impression on the Lower Left Corner on Mask 2, Thumb Impression on the Lower Left Corner on Mask 3
Painted in 2008

Artist’s Statement for Self Portraits with masks:

Self–Portraits with Masks is an investigation into what makes me,“Me”, and how distinct is it from others. Is it the lopsided image staring back from the mirror; the poses I strike, attitudes I assume, opinions I proffer, or is it something inviolate, intrinsic to me, and only me, like a fingerprint. The more I seek myself, the more I find others. T he roles I play in my own stories and the selves I see reflected in the stories of others. Constantly changing, shifting, transforming, evolving, negotiating and renegotiating the “Self”, I go through life collecting images, influences, attitudes, and making them my own. The masks I discover within, hint at the idea that perhaps “Me” is shape shifter; a composite of various fragments and reflections.

Putting these fragments in order, arranging them over and over, then, is the stuff of stories; my personal story, an “Autobiography”, however fictional.Alka Raghuram is a filmmaker and a painter. Her short films Tired of Dancing, Panchali and The Ant and The Monkey have screened at various festivals in the US and abroad.

Panchali received the John Gutman award for innovation in cinema and was a regional finalist in the Student Academy Awards (2004). The Ant and The Monkey received the Emerging Arts Fund in Spring 2006 from The Peninsula Community Foundation, and was nominated for the Princess Grace Award in 2005.

Her documentary about coping with grief and loss after the 2004 Tsunami in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, India, received the Donor Circle for the Arts Grant from Silicon Valley Foundation.

“The Conqueror”, is Allka’s first feature, It was presented at the Berlin Talent Project market  and Tribeca All Access in 2008, where Alka was awarded the L’Oreal Woman of Worth Vision Filmmaker Award. In November 2008 The Conqueror received Le Fonds Sud, a grant from the French Ministery of Culture towards the production of the film.