Nitheen Ramalingam is an Indian Visual Artist and educator currently based in Davis and Fremont, CA. Primarily a drawer and a painter, he is interested in exploring themes such as alienation, social class and identity using a historical lens and a figurative language. Ramalingam has upcoming exhibitions in Sacramento City Hall, CA; Gallery OED, Kochi, India and Method Gallery, New Delhi, India. In the past he has exhibited in several venues across the world such as The Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, CA; Stroom Den Haag,NL; Conflictorium-museum of Conflict,India; and Kintex Art Asia,Korea.
He will be an Artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center this year and in the past he has been a resident at The Verge center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA and has had studios and received mentorship from other institutions such as The Lalit Kala Akademi Regional center, Chennai, India and Khoj international Artists Association, New Delhi, India.
Born in Chennai, India, he recently graduated from the Art Studio MFA program at University of California, Davis. He has also received BVA in Painting and Printmaking and MVA in Painting from the M.S University of Baroda, India.
Artist Statement
Through figurative paintings and drawings, I have been meditating on people and their surroundings. An underlying aggrieved energy, suggestive of my concerns with alienation, oppression, and emancipation runs through these works.
The current body of paintings is based on witnessing the commemoration of the Kilvenmani martyr’s day. I hope to express viscerally the embodied unity and joy in the organized oppressed people but also to meditate on the decline and failures of this movement in recent history.
On Christmas Eve,1968, the village of Kilvenmani in the Nagapattinam district of southeastern India witnessed a horrific massacre. Under exploitative and unequal land relations, the peasants had become organized and militant; frustrated, one of the landlords and his henchmen killed 44 landless laborers by setting them on fire inside a hut.
Since then, this region where my forebearers are from, has undergone several waves of land redistribution, transforming social relations. The day is now remembered with organized strength and joy by the peasants and the others in the region. I witnessed this in 2021.Using pastels and oil paint, I am meditating on the scenes of the commemoration. The character of Oil paint lends itself to expressing a sense of passion and hope simultaneously with a gloomy undertone.
This body of paintings is affected conceptually and formally by my sculptural experimentation to build large objects and site-specific monuments. Through the readings from James E. Young and Miwon Kwon, I was introduced to the concept of "anti-monumental" art and other approaches to public art and community-based projects being explored by contemporary Western Artists. Similarly, delving into the writings of Nav Hak and Ken Lum provided me with a nuanced understanding of multiculturalism and identity politics within the art world.