Image by Michael Pham
In Feb 2025, Rakini Devi presented the 8th version of The Female Pope at the Arts Centre Melbourne at AsiaTopa Festival.
Devi’s durational performance of The Female Pope is a distillation of her visual and performance art practice, that embodies powerful hybrid female religious iconography. The work premiered in 2010, by invitation from the Friction International Live Art Festival, Sweden and subsequently performed in Helsinki, New York, Mexico, Sydney and AsiaTopa, Melbourne, 2025. This work has evolved over the past fifteen years, in five countries and eight versions of The Female Pope.
Devi describes her work as enactments or evocations that critique real world situations, namely global misogyny and femicide. She describes performing iconography in the context of her ongoing investigation as a form of linguistic trope, with the exaggerated use of elaborate costuming, framing the work in historic and colonial architecture, often creating installations inspired by Hindu shrines in her birth city of Kolkata. The work is also inspired by both Hindu and Catholic classical art, sculpture, and architecture.
Throughout the 3-hour performance, audiences wrote and attached personal “petitions” to the Pope’s veil, while the nonstop one- on-one meditations continued with audiences who queued for the entire 3 hours to participate till the very end. The performance begins and ends with a solemn procession, often led by the Pope’s assistant, who mediates with audience members on the protocols and timing of each encounter.
Video: Intimate Spectacle edited by Karl Ockelford.
