Why 23-year-old Raihan Rajiv Vadra’s work in immersive art is to watch out for

All of seven when he was first handed a camera by his mother, there has been no looking back for the young artist

Raihan Rajiv Vadra was all of seven when he was first handed a camera by his mother, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Indian politician who is also known for her enthusiasm in wildlife photography. “She’d always have a camera on her every time we went to the jungles, on safaris. When I was first handed a camera at that young age, I loved it,” Raihan reminisces. Ever since, there has been no looking back.

At 23, while he clocks in long hours at the Bikaner House in his hometown of Delhi, setting up his next exhibition Upamana as a parallel show during the upcoming edition of the India Art Fair, Raihan looks back at a journey where he came of age as an artist, who started out not knowing what he wanted to do in life. He loved tinkering with his lenses in the wilderness; later, while in boarding school, he was asked to photograph events. It began as a hobby, only to consume him entirely and become a way of life soon after.

Raihan’s trajectory, however, did not come without its chinks. In 2017, during his last year of school, he suffered a sporting accident that led him to lose his vision in his left eye, a condition that continues to be a concern. “The strain on my right eye was a lot. So I stopped doing photography for a couple of years. Therefore, I ended up not studying it,” he says.

Rediscovering photography

Eventually, in 2019, Raihan went on to study politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. By 2020, he had picked up the camera again in a bid to make a small buck on the side, while doing what he loved and dodging the banality of working odd jobs. “I fell in love with it all over again, because my actual perspective changed visually, so that was translating into my photography,” he says.

For Raihan, the graph has been far from linear. As he points out, when he was a child accompanying his parents into the wild, he did not set out thinking he’d gravitate towards the camera professionally. Inheriting it from his mother, the artist loved animals and wildlife, and as a budding shutterbug armed with a point-and-shoot device at the age of ten, he was willing to brave the searing heat or the freezing cold to capture an elusive beast. “That’s for photography. But earlier, I actually started off using one of those Sony camcorders and would record videos of tigers and of the safaris,” he says about his growing-up years spent vacationing under the canopied skies of the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand, or the Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan.

Evolution of the craft

Raihan explains his artistic journey rather punctiliously. He begins by talking about his time as an amateur wildlife photographer—or a wide-eyed child looking to capture the fascinating fauna of the jungles he visited on holidays. He then pauses and ruminates on the time he injured his eye that led him to reinvent his approach by learning to look at the world differently, quite literally. “It was more methodical then,” he says. But as the years went by, he let go of the rulebook and tapped into his inner child. “I didn’t bother about the rule of third, or that I have to get the entire animal or the subject in the frame. That way, it feels much more simple, natural, and gives you a better opportunity to create,” he says.

Today, he says the “best textbook for an artist is a well-curated Instagram feed,” and buttresses his thought by citing a host of names whose work he has encountered and followed through their social media feeds. “An artist whose work I keep going back to is Paul Cocksedge. His installations seamlessly fit into the public space. Then there’s Daniel Arsham; not that I take inspiration from his work, because my work is very different, but I really love his work,” says Raihan. He mentions Amsterdam-based photographer Sarah van Rij, Raghu Rai, even Banksy, and talks about how today, his craft isn’t limited to just photographs, but comprises installations that aim to engage all senses and faculties.

From a photographer to a visual artist

Raihan’s first show, Dark Perception, held in July 2021 toyed with the idea of how darkness can be instrumental to changing perceptions in formative ways, allowing a kind of freedom unattainable in the light. In December 2022, his next show Anumana took the thought behind his first exhibition a step further, by correlating the idea of “anumana,” the Sanskrit for “inference,” to the philosophies of choice through an immersive art and photography exhibition.

In Upamana, his upcoming exhibition opening on 27 January, and on display till 4 February at the Living Traditions Centre in Delhi’s Bikaner House, Raihan explores his musings on the term that roughly translates to “comparisons” in English. This immersive art show will use installations, visual art, sound and light to draw out multiple comparisons, analogies, even dichotomies that people encounter in life. The works are themed around control, choice, compulsion, memory and emotion, tropes that the artist touched upon in his last two exhibitions as well.

“I do plan to travel with these shows, but I also need to take a break because I am creatively burnt out. I have done three shows in the past three years, so that’s a lot. Travelling with the shows isn’t the taxing bit because then you aren’t creating something new, just making minor tweaks according to the new location,” he says. The plan, right now, is to close this series of five solo shows, spread over the span of a decade—based on the five schools of logic in Indian philosophy or five pramanas—of which Upamana is a part, in a cohesive way.

For Raihan, the process of creating an artwork from scratch is as meditative as it is stirring. He invokes Virgil Abloh in this moment, mentioning how the American design icon had once picked up a candle stand and said, “If I put this candle in an all-white gallery, it looks like art, if I put it in a garage it looks like a piece of trash,” reminding him of the bigger picture and the significance of context.

“When I am putting up an exhibition with photographs, I look at the photographs last, and the rest of the space first because that is what people primarily respond to, and then they respond to the images,” the 23-year-old says, while piecing together his next show to bring the walls of the gallery alive.

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