Our Spotlight showcases the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities.
This December, we’re highlighting the influential work of artist and ethnographer Ritika Ganguly.
Disciplines: Music composition, cultural anthropology, transdisciplinary sound & smell art
MRAC Grant Programs: Next Step Fund (2018, 2022), Arts Impact for Individuals (2023).
About This Grantee
Ritika grew up in millennial Delhi—the gentle and brutal national capital of India—home to the oldest mountain range in the country, three generations of her family, vibrant markets, notorious landfills, steep inequality, musical lineages, poets, skilled tailors, and delicious street food. Her artistic curiosities are shaped by her parents’ love for language and people’s theater, her Baul mentors’ love of music-making in lal maati’r desh (the land of the red soil), and the many academic and artist communities that she has journeyed through. Her approach to transdisciplinary work is formed within these different webs of belonging.
Ritika’s artistic practice engages with orally transmitted genres of music, poetry, and narration. She trains with traditional folk musicians in what it means to develop aural skills in community. Her compositional works rely less on music notation and theory and more on audiative practices that deepen our aptitude to hear and vocalize. Her works explore power and hierarchy while creating a space where the stories of ordinary citizens can be told.
Ritika’s emerging experimental work in sound art explores the many different ways in which we can evidence sound—how sound may be experienced through the other four senses of smell, touch, taste, and sight; how we can use sound to see the act of silencing; and the socially constructed boundaries between sound, noise, and music. Ritika is interested in the political possibilities of visualizing sound, and central to her ongoing projects is the question “When we don’t have available legible forms of speaking, then how may we hear each other?” As a cultural anthropologist, she remains curious about the infinite meaning-making strategies of resonating with one another, despite being rendered illegible by someone or something.
How has MRAC funding helped your practice?
“Some of the most pivotal moments in my artistry have been supported by MRAC’s Next Step Fund. In 2018, I was able to plan a trip to immerse myself in the community of Baul (itinerant Bengali Sufi) musicians in West Bengal (my ancestral home). There, I was able to embark upon a lasting relationship with a 600-year-old musical tradition. In 2023, on another Next Step Fund award, I travelled to a different village and was accepted as a student of an enormous figure and voice in the Baul community—Basudeb Das Baul. The ability to share my compositions in the Baul musical genre with the Baul community and to be recognized as a ‘Baul soul’ (I was given the title Khepi), remains one of my most cherished moments as an artist. On this trip, my mentors also shared songs and poetry preserved only through oral storytelling—poetry that I have composed into songs and shared with my communities in Minnesota.”
To learn about Ritika’s Listening, deeply project and watch videos of her trip to West Bengal, visit her website here.
“I also received an Arts Impact for Individuals grant in 2023 that allowed me to deepen and sustain my practice in collaborative humming in harmony. Workshop participants noted that while they expected to feel vibration in group humming, they had not experienced receiving the warmth of group resonance via humming before. I intend to offer and explore more of these opportunities in 2025.” —Ritika Ganguly
Stay Connected
MRAC’s Grantee Spotlight is a series to showcase the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities. Stay connected with this month’s grantee:
Visit Ritika’s website to discover more about her many artistic projects.
Follow her on Instagram @Aamalaki.
You can also join Ritika when she leads the Bell Museum’s January Spotlight Science event:
The Science of Sound
University of Minnesota
Saturday, January 18, 2025, 10 am–2 pm