Artistic Projects

Image Credit: Dan Norman
Using a combination of live singing, sound visualizers, eye scans, spices, prison poetry from scholars and students in Indian prisons, live plants, their smells and shadows, this installation performance explores the tether between sound and home, incomprehensible cacophony and enforced silence.

Apertures: A creative portrayal of domestic violence draws on shadow puppetry, poetry, and vocal soundscapes to represent a spectrum of lived experiences of gender-based violence in our societies, and the specter of patriarchy that shapes them.

Image Credit: Jayme Halbritter
As part of the McKnight Composer Fellowships, Ritika composed this Nazm in Urdu - a poem by Delhi-based poet and friend Nadim Asrar. As an R&B articulation, it retains the longingness, loss and melancholy central to the presentation of a Nazm.

Image Artwork: Roshan Ganu
Commissioned by the Minnesota Opera, Xylem tells the story of a tree named Tara (meaning ‘they’ in Bangla), with a libidinous network of roots that touch every inch of the globe.

Poster Credit: The Cedar Cultural Center
Seven incarcerated artists collaborate with seven Twin Cities-based artists in SEEN’s partnership with the Weisman Art Museum. In this episode curated by Ritika The Cedar Cultural Center, three inside artists collaborate with artists on the ‘outside’ to create performance art pieces.

Poster Credit: The Cedar Cultural Center
Featuring seven musicians exploring odd-timed signatures in different traditions of music. the Odd Measures Even-ing at The Cedar curated by Ritika, opens up worlds of rhythmic possibilities.

Image Credit: Raga Labs
Ritika composed an overture from Lalon’s Baul poetry for this production of Raga Labs in 2017. ‘Raga Labs brings together the best musicians in world music genres to create unique collaborations.’ In this productions, invited Twin Cities musicians explore two classic songs in Macedonian and Bengali in a lilting 7/8 meter.

Image Credit: Chitra Vairavan
Osthir: States of Effervescence is a project where poem meets song. Commissioned by The Cedar Cultural Center, it explores the inherent musicality of literature straddling 19th century Bengal to contemporary New Delhi to Victorian England to 20th century Chile.