Kruthika / TheWorkplaceDoodler

Outside the ‘Futures Cone’ (a work in progress)

The Futures Cone is often used by the current forecasters of our collective futures – corporations, designers, lobbyists, investors – to envision “probable” and “preferable” futures. It views possible futures as a series of linear paths from the present moment, with boundaries established by the current hegemonic system. This piece, inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” questions that very notion. What if our imaginations, poetry, innermost dreams guided our futures instead? What if we reimagined the world undeterred by the Cone’s margins?

Iron Obsession

An artifact from a surreal world, which has a deep commitment to iron, values animal equity, and demonstrates a cultural love for asymmetry. The rest of the world was “built” by repeatedly asking, “if those things are true, what else can be true?” The result was a fortune telling mat, where the future is told using the clues of each menstrual cycle. Imagined as a parchment with ancient blood from the first ever cycle, but executed with coffee (for our world seems to embrace all but menstrual blood).

A Sketch In Time (90 min)

Prompt by Nina Katchedourian: “With good material and without a plan, make an artwork on extremely beautiful paper. You may think about the artwork as much as you want, and plan it in your head, but you may not do any preparatory sketches or “rehearsals.” When it comes time to do the work, you must set a timer for 1.5 hours, and when it rings, you are done.”

Doodlerism: A Manifesto

A manifesto on what it means to be a doodler, and the importance of doodles.

Savitribai Phule

A moving sculpture on girls’ rights, education, and freedom. The installation pays homage to Savitribai Phule, India’s revolutionary feminist reformer who was the first to educate girls. If the book is left open, the sculptures move up, symbolizing the power of education to uplift and empower.

Doodling a Festival

Over the course of the Gallatin Arts Festival 2024 (GAF), the artist presented herself as the observer and doodling archivist of the festival. Viewers were encouraged to participate by offering their insights, sensory experiences, and memories of GAF, in the hope that it would add to a collective archive. The prompts included words, music, other images, or anything the audience was able to offer. The act of doodling from the collective rather than from one person’s perspective explored collective archiving as a communal experience of those gathered at a given space and time, and visual art merging into performance. It culminated in this piece.

Kruthika / TheWorkplaceDoodler is a multimedia artist and lawyer. Her work explores feminist advocacy, human rights, and justice, with a focus on the global majority. Her current interests involve the power of radical imagination in dreaming, realising, and birthing new futures. She is interested in breaking rules of genre, often incorporating play, humour, and twists in her work. In both kinds of her art—that which is overtly political and that which is seemingly more playful— she uses narrative, storytelling, and audience expectations as an invitation to shared dialogue. She is from Bengaluru, India and works in New York.