Ritika Khurana

About

There are many different approaches to design, and it holds no fixed meaning. Following Martino Gamper’s “performance of design,” I consider my work as a designer to entail “the performance of material.” I see design as a state of mind that is constantly shifting, shaped by tensions, collisions, and the unknown.

I find inspiration in the overlooked, discarded, and fragmented, seeing in them quiet, untold stories. My work exists in the in-between: between material and form, between presence and absence, between intention and accident, where control is surrendered to intuition. My practice then becomes an exploration of perception that creates blind spots through expectation. It is within these moments of deviation from the familiar that meaning quietly unfolds for me, revealing itself in the fluidity of change.

I resist definition. I do not fit neatly into categories, nor do I wish to, embracing the freedom of fluidity in my work. I work in fragments, in pauses, and in moments of release. Each work is an experiment, a negotiation between forces where meaning emerges through process rather than prescription. I care less for resolution and more for the rhythms of becoming, for what materials whisper when I let go, and for what they reveal in their transformation, allowing me to  surrender to the unexpected.

I believe the act of experimentation can itself become an experience shared with the audience. Moving away from static, finished products, my approach invites viewers to witness the evolution of materials in real time. My work unsettles the structures that define how we perceive and interact with materials and objects, and, implicitly, perhaps, with our own minds and bodies, in what Mijke van der Drift and Nat Raha describe as the ‘ensouled bodymind,’ where thought, feeling, and matter are deeply intertwined.