Ruks Khandagale And The Digital Evolution Of Artistic Expression In 2025

In early 2025, a quiet yet powerful shift reverberated through India’s digital cultural landscape, as performance artist and digital creator Ruks Khandagale emerged at the intersection of avant-garde expression and online visibility. Amid growing discourse around body autonomy, digital intimacy, and the boundaries of art in public spaces, Khandagale’s recent multimedia projects—often mischaracterized in sensationalist online chatter—have sparked nuanced conversations across artistic, academic, and social spheres. Far from the crude mislabeling that circulates in certain corners of the internet, her work in 2025 represents a bold fusion of performance art, digital storytelling, and feminist critique, challenging conventional norms of representation in post-digital India.

What some fringe networks misleadingly refer to as “sex videos” are, in reality, experimental short films that explore themes of identity, vulnerability, and self-possession. These pieces, shared selectively through curated digital platforms and art festivals, draw inspiration from global movements led by artists like Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, and more recently, American multimedia artist Juliana Huxtable. Khandagale’s approach aligns with a rising cohort of South Asian creators who are reclaiming narrative control over their bodies and digital personas, resisting the patriarchal gatekeeping that has long dominated mainstream media. Her work does not seek titillation but introspection—using the camera as a mirror to dissect societal taboos around female desire, autonomy, and digital consent.

The trend of conflating artistic nudity with obscenity is not new—history is replete with cases where female creators are policed for their imagery while male counterparts are celebrated for the same. In 2025, this double standard persists, yet it is increasingly being challenged by a generation that demands context over clicks. Khandagale’s work has drawn acclaim from curators at the Delhi-based Nature Morte gallery and international critics at the Berlin Atonal festival, where her piece *Skin Archive: Monsoon Diaries* was featured as part of a larger exhibition on digital embodiment. The work, a series of time-lapse video essays filmed over monsoon seasons in rural Maharashtra, examines the relationship between land, body, and memory through poetic, non-explicit bodily presence.

Her rise parallels a broader cultural pivot: the growing influence of Indian digital artists who leverage online platforms not for virality, but for subversion. Figures like Mithu Sen and Vibha Galhotra have paved the way, but Khandagale represents a new wave—one that navigates Instagram censorship, YouTube demonetization, and state surveillance with strategic ambiguity and poetic precision. As India debates new digital media regulations in 2025, her work stands as both artifact and argument—a reminder that the personal, political, and aesthetic are inseparable in the age of algorithmic visibility.