The MTHARU design studio started with the notion of leveraging upon the existing creative programming in Sumer Singh’s ancestral DNA of 500 years of creatives. This exhibition displays the origin of the studio with some of its first designs, and use those as a template to tell the future of the studio’s evolution. This exhibition seeks to reinvent the studio’s past, Sumer Singh’s ancestral memories and its traditions in order to propose alternatives for the future.

In retrospective, the studio displays the designs that started its creative journey. These were based on materials and fabrication techniques that were familiar, namely metals and glass.

In order to weave between the retrospective and speculative future, the studio researched new material compositions to develop intermediary designs and unique surface effects. This set a new precedent of design possibilities that were further explored using digital design processes.

In prospective, the studio has evolved from using a conventional analog+digital design process to a post-digital based practice. The studio displays its prowess in post-digital design where machines and digital generative techniques are leveraged to enhance existing tools by making software do something it isn’t supposed to. These new tools are then brought back to the human to create a new body of work that proposes new alternatives and forms

This exhibition uses design as a way of reinventing the studio’s current reality through a constant speculation on what might have been: the realm of the possible equally resides in the future and in the past. Design is treated as a highly speculative practice that can, through its own disciplinary means, contribute to reinvent reality and offer alternative imaginaries.

This project is part of the King East Design District (KEDD). Several receptions, talks, and events will be happening for KEDD Night on Monday, January 20, 6-9pm.