RaiHaN Okr3

RaiHaN Okr3 Biography

United Kingdom

Raihan is a nuerodivergent, LGBTQI, outsider artist. with a background in Anthropology, they choose to express the human experience that resides at the core of the subject in a form beyond language. Therefore they use symbols, myths and rituals as a palette, stripping bare the sinews of the word revealing a freedom of expression beyond the boundaries of the page.

Raihan's art  as laececraft, the Anglo-Saxon word for healing, is informed by the works of William Burroughs whose book of shadows, the Yage letters, provides a systemic and magickal practice, Burroughs calls ‘the cut-up technique,’ A supernatural technology which allows the practitioner to re-arrange and re-weave reality. The practice consists of elements of zen philosophy, and collage, cutting up and rearranging: words, pictures or film. Thus Revealing ancestral, voices which speak through the mosaic of creation.

Raihan’s work is nomadic and portable, like our cave dwelling artist relations. It is also frugal choosing only minimal images to allow the voices passage.

Raihan’s locus of interest is the cave art and beautiful ivory forms of the ancient artists who once painted and carved their memory into history.

ice age art, the work of our ancestors has always been an inspiration, from the fever dreams of childhood traced to the precipice of the present moment,   its ability to speak to us from deep time is a profound fascination. With their knowledge they have constructed a lore, mythology and system of beliefs, at the core,   our ancestors animistic world view.

At this epoch of ecological mayhem, Raihan employs the cut-up method, shamanistic rituals, Ice Age art and telepathines to express the new and restless beings,  speaking to us from the unconformity.

Raihan's work intersects the cataclysm of the Anthropocene with the potentialities of de-extinction. Focusing on the spiritual relationship between humans and the animals of the past, particularly the woolly mammoth. Raihan's work asks questions of bodily autonomy, religion, speciesism and a world in which a mammal is being called upon from the deep past to save the present moment. They question the intersecting relationship of humans and mammoths and the resulting cultural systems, beliefs, ideas and values, homo- sapien shared with their mammoth relations.

As the permafrost melts it reveals more and more the bones, blood and tusks of our long-dead spiritual relation.

Whilst Raihan re-weaves their song, which is once again being sung, from the years, months days hours of times own Mammoth steppe.

Finally,  Raihan's work is protest, provoking reactions in the audience, Like the mammoth, calling to and from our collective unconscious.

Are we playing god or are we being played by Gods? ancestral spirits of ancient mammals that roamed the earth for thousands of years before we existed and potentially, through cloning programmes, could rule the world again, long after we’re gone.