Rishi Khurana
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 5 min read
Rishi Khurana is an Indian multidisciplinary artist living in London. His work includes painting, performance, video, and sculpture. He explores how power, value, and cultural symbols influence collective identity. His background in New Delhi and his current life in London inform his approach. He often uses materials sourced from their original locations, such as dust, spices, and water. These materials bring a sense of the places where they were gathered. This method transforms each piece into an object and a document, linking it to the changing stories of urban life. By blending critique of institutions with personal experience, Khurana examines the systems that determine meaning and value.
Q: You move between painting, performance and sculpture. What pulls you from one to another?
A: My practice spans across painting, performance, video and sculpture — sometimes incorporating all in one project. I have been practicing fine arts — painting since I was 7 years old. In India my practice was very engrossed and consumed within the four walls of canvas. However, there was a drastic change as soon as I was exposed to the international cultural art scene of London two years ago. I started to delve more into performance and video as mediums to express my practice in a more gestural and immersive way. The process of each artwork is of great importance to me, as all of my manifestations are part of an evolving practice that constitutes my current self — constantly interacting and in conversation with its surroundings. These “manifestations” are in the form of living synecdoche that evolve with time, questioning, contradicting and making transitional marks as they are touched by the current surrounding.
Q: “Sloane Street” brings the city into your work in a direct way. What made you want to do that?
A: Growing up in New Delhi in a Punjabi family — value association to materialistic possessions and their attendant familiarity within the social hierarchy has always served as a stimulus for my practice to explore the intricate dynamic between self, class and cultural signifier.
“Sloane Street” was a location that after an in-depth research was finalised for this project for its characteristics to host multiple labels that create a collective sense of familiarity and associations with status, symbol and power structures in a continuous stretch of 1 km. The performance of this project involved painting the facades of these shops with red paint on a canvas — wearing it like a cape to walk all around Central London, thereby marking references from my traditional painting background, institutional critique and cultural background.
Q: You often use things like dust, spices and water. How do those materials change the way you think while working?
A: Each of these mediums is sourced locally. Some carry ephemerality like the dust or the smell of spices, some are much more constant like the acrylic paint or the cracks caused on the painting by River Thames. The use of these mediums transitions the work into a site-specific evolving live object that interacts with its animated surrounding backdrop to create expanded undocumented forms of happening. The materials I use act as palimpsest to the site where they were sourced from.
Hence they don't change the way I think during the process; I change the way these materials are perceived by isolating them on a surface of documentation. Using their familiarity, ephemerality, experientiality and site specificity, the materials constitute the making of constructed narratives by representing realities.
Q: Power and symbols seem to run through everything you do. Where does that curiosity come from?
A: My transition between two capital geographical locations — New Delhi to London — has a common thread that I experienced: an analogous rhythm of social mobility through a perpetual quest for power, value and status. The amalgamation of such narratives merged in context with the opaque institutional system and symbols of the urban landscapes has always inspired me to explore deeper interconnected threads of associations, credibility, social hierarchy and the value we assign to inanimate objects.
Q: Growing up in New Delhi and now living in London — do those two worlds ever overlap in your head while you work?
A: Yes, in my practice I frequently spark cross-cultural dialogues through the fusion of my current geographical location’s site specificity and narratives from back home. One good example of such is “Pigeon with 2557 Feathers” (2024) — a work that sparks questions on how does an object collect symbolic and economic capital? How does an object become associated with these symbols of familiarity? Isn't this poop on the beautiful bird disgusting? Maybe it is an attempt to provoke emotions? Or is it a very lucky pigeon?
The urban bird’s ability to feed on human leftovers is reversed in this dynamic to create an art object that feeds “pigeon’s leftovers” to humans in the form of a meticulously crafted artefact to be displayed on a museum’s plinth. To summarise — when making a work, I take inspiration from the site of production, its symbols and historicised narratives by questioning current reality simultaneously.
Q: “The Script Exchange” blurs what’s real and what’s staged. Does that tension still excite you?
A: “The Script Exchange” (2025) is a video performance art project which expands my process-driven practice even further. The boundary between live and past-documented is blurred through the use of a medium that is engraved in the thread of our collective familiarity — social media. The tension between real and staged is often the core essence of my multidisciplinary projects, which aims to form an expanded painting practice. The past is what shapes the manifestation of an object, the current is what it interacts with and tomorrow is what it will transition into through these interactions and raise questions of “could it be?”.
Another example of such curiosity is reflected in my upcoming project, which is going to be made in collaboration with my alter ego (“Vicri Label” — a hand-painted wearable art label).
The project is a video art about burglary in a museum, with the burglar stealing elements that isolate an artwork in a particular context. The stolen objects get dissolved once they are exposed to the outside world.
The project also steps outside of its four-walled video frame into reality with references taken from an Indian childhood game (“Raja, Mantri, Chor, Sipahi”), which translates to (King, Minister, Thief and Soldier). The game will be packed in an envelope and will be pasted across the city of London on various lamp posts and walls.
“Vicri Label” will be producing a hand-painted fashion collection by stealing/copying the elements from the burglary video. The final phase of this project ends with the artist — me — suing my own alter ego “Vicri Label” over copyright infringement.
This work questions the monetary value bubble created inside the institutions. What happens to a work of art that steps out of the walls of an institution — does it lose its value and transition into an object that it was?
Or does it carry its value in the mind of the burglar? What happens to artwork that is made in the context of outside and is dissolved in the same context? Is it synonymous to the artist's act of stealing from their environment, or is it the choice of words… what if I use the word “reference”?
The project has been in development. By sharing a preliminary outline of this unfinished project in an interview text to be read by a vast audience — its conceptual framework is subtly being embedded in those around me to “steal from” or “reference from”.
