Avantika Khanna
Harzer Straße 24-25
12059, Berlin
DE
May 30-31, 2026
What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?1
A clear glass pane stands tall atop a curved block of concrete of slight thickness, balancing almost impossibly on a single glass marble. On it, white scribbles dance in every which way, an anachronistic outpouring of thoughts, dreams, feelings, and wishes, immortalized for as long as nature allows them to be. A chain of the same material – glass – hangs from the top, a three-dimensional extension of the aforementioned outpouring. Although it is seemingly motionless, its stature, unknown past life, and almost feverish inscriptions bring it abuzz, as if the atoms it’s composed of, the millions of little bits of glass paneness and curved block of concreteness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside it, were attempting to remember the lives they inhabited before this one, vibrating with the residual presence of everything they had once touched, conspiring toward form.
In many ways, Avantika Khanna’s work operates within a universe in which objects and people continuously absorb traces of one another, insofar as she allows each piece to become an extension of herself and vice versa, with the presumption that the term “found” in “found objects” applies both ways. Her work seems to unfold within an ecology of relay, in which thoughts, objects, gestures, and memories continuously pass traces of themselves between one another, with a special appreciation of found objects as gifts: as a sculptor, she bears the responsibility for adding “things” to a planet so full of things it is collapsing under its own weight, a planet still-oh-so-bountiful-despite-it-all that it provides, too, the objects she comes across and then repurposes in her practice. And in doing so, her work represents the eternally human need to materialize the immaterial, to physicalize the metaphysical, to document, to archive; to leave a trace behind of what was first within us, in constant conversation with Earth’s bounty.
But it also seems to understand that if, in our current form, we have a place in this universe, this universe has a place within us: what starts as a thought in our head and is then transferred onto a physical medium can’t have really originated in our head; what exists within existed outside first, and what existed outside first existed within first, too; as though consciousness itself were merely a fold in the fabric of the world, something porous rather than sovereign, as if thought itself were less an act of invention than reception. And thus, within her practice, objects cease to be inert things, becoming repositories waiting to be activated by encounter.
Avantika Khanna’s first solo show proposes a universe in which entities are never fully distinct from one another, where prolonged contact produces exchange and transformation; the message passed from bird to monkey to parent to artist functions almost atomically: meaning migrates across forms, accumulating force through transmission, allowing a reality in which the external world and the interior self continuously author one another.
- Pablo García Contreras
1 O'Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. Dalkey Archive Press, 1999.
Pablo García Contreras
Lucía Del Mar
George Hilless
Marissa Leitman
Nicholas Lindell-Wright
Üni So
Harzer Straße 24-25
12059, Berlin
DE
February 20th, 2026