Ika Peraic

Ika Peraic is an artist and designer currently pursuing a PhD in Humanities at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (Croatia), BDes from the Faculty of Architecture – School of Design in Zagreb and an MDes from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Her master’s thesis ‘Museum as a platform for a speculative investigation: Exploring the possibilities for a postcolonial museum through practice-led research’ involved a speculative investigation, combining theory and design practice with a view to developing a more complex understanding of the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage of relevance to the invention of more appropriate ways of expressing indigenous cultures and creating museum displays more sensitive to alternative forms of knowledge. Through her PhD studies she will explore further how conventional exhibition spaces and museums could be critically reconstructed in order for performative spaces to unfurl. She is interested in investigating ways to express the relationship between tangible and intangible knowledges without reifying them in visualist terms, but instead foregrounding their sensorial dimension. Affect-driven aesthetics interested in the often messy ongoing-ness of process enables her to imagine modes of expressing things that are curious, inquisitive, messy, risky, and attentive to the gathering of what is neglected or rendered absent within the dominant discourse (or, in short, non-didactic). She is interested in how an approach that foregrounds sensorial experience and its affective charge can help us understand “things” in new ways, and design exhibition spaces that are situational (open to contingency and chance) and sensitive to alternative forms of knowledge.