In Nov 2025, Rakini Devi presented the 9th version of The Female Pope over 2 days at The Art Gallery of South Australia, as part of OzAsia.

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 nine 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 for the duration of the work.