Raha – South African decolonial artist
Raha is a South African decolonial artist and somatic educator whose practice centers feminine knowledge systems, embodied remembrance and lineage-based transmission. She works with the metaphor and materiality of the Red Thread – the living continuum of blood, memory, ancestry and land that binds body to territory and woman to lineage.
Grounded in over fifteen years of disciplined, ancestral and initiatory training, her work positions the body as archive and sovereign site of knowledge. Through installation, movement and somatic practice Raha explores how memory is carried within flesh and landscape – and how continuity can be tended without spectacle. Working across textile, earth and site responsive environments, she reclaims the body – particularly the yoni as a locus of intelligence, reverence and return.
Working across installation, movement and somatic art creations, Raha reclaims the body – particularly the yoni – as a site of intelligence, reverence and return. This reclamation is not symbolic, but experiential, emerging through sustained engagement with womb- based practice, embodied ritual conscious movement and relational somatic methodologies.
In 2009, she founded Divine Lotus as a container for feminine remembrance, responding to the silencing of women’s body knowledge across religious, colonial and cultural contexts. From this lineage emerged both her written work, “Cutting My Flower” (2014) and the Divine Lotus Somatic Cushion (2016), conceived as a form of feminine technology supporting rest, anatomical awareness and embodied self connection.
Her current body of work unfolds through Remember Her, an ongoing series of immersive, self-guided yoni-land installations. These site specific environments function as threshold spaces, inviting women into a somatic encounter with the body as a archive and land as living memory.
Raha’s work has been presented across South Africa and internationally, including Egypt, Turkey, France and the United Kingdom. Across all contexts, her practice prioritizes containment, slowness and relational presence.
She approaches art not as display but as an act of tending – preserving what is sacred through embodied transmission.
As research towards Remember Her, Raha developed Remembrance: an Elemental Performance Series – site based studies in fabric, land, veil, water and clay. These works function as architectural sketches for future immersive installations, exploring the body as terrain and landscape as cosmological mirror.
