International Workshop - Goa (2017)

Khoj International Workshop Goa 2017

Our deepest gratitude to Orijit Sen and Gurpreet Sidhu for opening their home and heart to us.

Thank you Pradeep Naik for the constant support and encouragement.

Khoj International Workshop Goa 2017

Critic’s Note by Rosalyn D’mello Photos by Ankit Patel, Katyayini Gargi, Diptej Vernekar, Francesco Fonassi, Sahil Naik, Sergiy Petlyuk and Zarouhie Abdalian.

All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission.

Printed at Satyam Grafix, New Delhi

khojworkshop.org

Khoj International Workshop Goa 2017

26 March — 9 April 2017 Khoj International Workshop Goa at Old Pereira House, Corjeum

Zarouhie Abdalian

Francesco Fonassi

Sonatina Mendes

Minam Apang

Bhisaji Gadekar

Sahil Naik

Shailesh BR

Katyayini Gargi

Sergiy Petlyuk

Asli Cavusoglu

Parul Gupta

Gagan Singh

Baptist Coelho

Lu Yang

Diptej Vernekar

Rasel Chowdhury

Nazrin Mammadova

Rosalyn D’Mello (critic)

Pranay Dutta

Danushka Marasinghe

Marzia Farhana

Shilpa Mayenkar

Khoj and the Story of the International Workshop Khoj began on a Diwali night in 1997 as sparks lit up the Delhi sky. Several artists walked onto a small terrace in Defence Colony one by one: Yoba Jonathan from Namibia, David Kolaone from South Africa, Ludenyi Omega from Kenya, Simon Callery, Stephen Hughes and Anna Kindersley from London, Wendy Teakel from Australia, Muhanned Cader from Sri Lanka, Rini Tandon from Austria, Luis Gomez from Cuba, Iftikhar Dadi from Pakistan and artist friends from across India.

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There are no words to express what it meant for the working group that, till a month before, didn’t know whether Khoj would happen. Like the unpredictable dial tone used to connect with artists around the world – there were moments of anxiety, anticipation and patience - until you heard the beep and a voice at the other end and you knew you had succeeded. Khoj became a palpable reality on that memorable Diwali night in 1997.

Working together, dancing, drinking and debating, every consecutive workshop of artists from near and far, has been a crucible of learning — an important space not only to experiment, but also to challenge our understanding of art and art making: something that has become a constant for Khoj over the past two decades.

Today, the central idea of the international workshop is for Khoj to be a catalyst for local art incubation processes in various parts of the country, where contemporary art practice is still emerging. A dynamic and effective methodology has emerged, in collaboration with artist working groups in each of these locations. The workshops incubated and seeded the potential for other artist-led organisations by providing support in terms of organisation and administrative knowledge, curatorial ideas, and access to international artists networks.

In its 20th year, and thirteen workshops later, the Khoj International Workshop Goa was no different, built with nervousness, joy, anxiety, love, frustration and above all the passion to create a space for young artists. The Goa-based working group, Por Mar Collective, with Bhisaji Gadekar, Shilpa Mayenkar, Sahil Ravindra Naik and Diptej Vernekar along with the support and guidance of Pradeep Naik, Kedar DK and Kalidas Mohan Mhamal spent many months building the workshop from scratch. In the a state where support structures for the arts are few, and securing funds for the workshop was a major challenge, the toil was real and the difficulties escalating by the day. At one point in the January of 2017, the workshop looked like an impossiblity as it did in 1997 or any other year. But the taxis ran along roads lined with green and water, as they brought artists from all over India and the world to the opening.

as much as it takes trust. And the working group of artists earned that trust each day. With an invigorating line-up of twenty one Indian and international artists working with diverse mediums, the Khoj International Workshop Goa aimed to push the envelope of dominant contemporary art practice within the state of Goa, where art making is largely unchallenged and uncritiqued.

The workshop of course was not without problems: the unforgiving weather, lack of support and government funds, and logistical challenges of material sourcing often affected the tempo and morale of the artist, as they have in each edition of the work. Most artists of the working group were organising an event of this scale for the first time, and each day was a day to learn and come to terms with.

But here is where understanding is born and friendships bloom; to make do with what we have, support each other and drink the misery of the day away.

Alongside the problems, there were great conversations, lots of music, swimming in the seas, the pungent smell of a glass of fenny and laughter — as works began to come together and take form. On the 15th day, there were people, a lot of people.

Again, as always, there are no words to express what it meant for the working group that, till a month before, didn’t know whether it would all come together. But here they were against all odds, having made the workshop their own, just with a few more friends now from all over the world.

It is important here to thank Orijit Sen and Gurpreet Sidhu, who were a part of this story along with these young artists from the very beginning. It takes a big heart to open out your home to artists and allow them to take over it,

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Critic’s Note

by Rosalyn D’Mello I thought it’d make for a great walking game, counting jackfruits as I encountered them en route from Pinto House, which I was temporarily inhabiting with seven other artists, to Old Pereira House, the site for the 2017 Khoj International Workshop. My Fitbit tracked the distance at around 1,000 steps, accounting also for the active minutes that the climb uphill involved. But 200 meters into my solitary walk one afternoon that summer I had to give up. Tallying the jackfruits could easily take at least up to a week. There was so much abundance in every tiny patch, in fact, the more abandoned the property, the bigger and riper and more laden the tree. Of course, the warm, intoxicating scent of cashews blossoming pervasively proved sufficiently distracting. I spotted many red and yellow cashew apples dangling from trees, even tried to pick off the many that had fallen by the wayside.

There was also the silent smell of bread baking in the stone oven of a local bakery outside which children played Frisbee on the road. Soon after, as I continued walking, I heard the shuddering of leaves. I stopped in my tracks, looked to my left, and found a jackfruit-green snake slithering through a crack in the stone fencing of a vast, vacant property. I saw its tongue stick out, red and feral, as it motioned forward before disappearing out of sight.

The Old Pereira House was nestled within this fecund, undulating landscape of the island of Corjeum. Orijit Sen, our host, remembered a time when he and his family had first moved here, almost a decade or so ago. Their daily commute and social calendar depended squarely on the first and last ferry to and fro. Every islander would’ve internalized the timetable. The ferry’s routine was the covert mechanism that marked the hours, making it Corjeum’s elusive heartbeat. Today, a bridge seamlessly connects Corjeum to Aldona, allowing residents 24/7 access to either side of the river. Time is now marked more discreetly, by the tide of the river’s swell and the humdrum of the motors of absentee ferries.

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The precise ‘old’-ness of the Old Pereira House was irrelevant. Traces of centuries-old splendor remained on walls, ceilings, or were nestled in the crevices of floors.

Orijit preferred to let the space be. He and his co-artist family, comprising wife Gurpreet and daughter Pakhi, chose to inhabit the outhouse bordering the main building neighboring the newest element within the property, a watchtower-like structure, two-stories high, built just before the Khoj workshop could begin. The Old Pereira House offered context to the 22 resident artists who had been accommodated between three Goan homes in the immediate vicinity. It was where we conglomerated daily, at hours of our choosing, to work in solitude as well as to dialogue, share, present, and debate. The veranda bordering the front compound became our lunch venue.

We sat on old chairs or stood against walls or sat on the balcao as all manner of delicate birds and insects hovered visibly. The days were unstructured, except for post-lunch presentations in the afternoon that allowed us to discover each other’s practices and ask difficult questions in a collegial environment. Otherwise, we free-styled our way through the workshop, with some artists preferring the sanctity of a rigid, daily practice, and others prioritizing the solemnity of serendipitous encounters. The perplexing mystery that we had tried to uncork on our first evening together at one of the three houses, was what had brought us all together, considering the workshop was not application-based. Even our Goan hosts, a bunch of artists, including Diptej Vernekar, Bhisaji Gadekar, Shilpa Mayenkar, and Sahil Naik had banded together to become the Por Mar Collective for the explicit purpose of organizing the workshop, which, incidentally, coincided with Khoj’s 20-year anniversary celebrations. It was a moment of transnational togetherness, courtesy the intuitions of the organisers. There was the hand of chance that oversaw the whole business of why those of us who were here were here to begin with. We had been chosen by a logic we couldn’t necessarily decipher. We had to settle for fate as the governing rationale.

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It was fate, indeed, that we were here in the unrelenting heat and humidity of summer, compelled to meditate on the compunctions of time and how it could be measured in the unique post-colonial context of Goa, which still maintained an agrarian ethos. One visitor to the site told me, for instance, how she had heard that apparently 45 days after the cotton tree bursts, there would be rain. Two days before she had communicated this bit of agrarian gossip, there were already tufts of cotton speckling the earth, which would become the grist for the ArmenianAmerican artist, Zarouhie Abdalian. But the sky was always deceptive, starting out overcast in the morning, promising rain but offering only intermittent breezes so that the only permanent moistness was the sweat on our brows. It was in these wet circumstances that we collectively labored on our individual practices. It reminded me of a trip I’d made in August the year before to the Yarra valley, near Melbourne, where I learned about the logic of cold weather wines.

It had previously not occurred to me how significantly seasonal changes tempered grapes, altering and affecting the flavor and depth of the wine they produced. I wondered if a similar conditioning dictated the taste of jackfruits and mangoes. Every other day a bunch of sweet-toothed aficionados ventured to the local Aldona market to bargain for locally sourced mangoes, feasting on them during our morning indulgences, delighting in the plenitude of warmth and richness. The commingling scents of jackfruit and cashew compensated for the humidity. They wafted on the edge of a breeze, satisfying unfelt hungers. Among the greatest blessings that seemed to justify the heat was urak, the first distillation of fermented cashew nectar. Amid the bustle of the day, the struggle with visual and verbal language, there was the distinct pleasure to look forward to— of casual evening gatherings over a bottle of urak when the politely strong liquor replenished our conversations about art and literature and love and longing, carrying us through the early hours of morning. It punctuated our anecdotes with moments of lucid laughter, causing us to spill over slightly onto the streets with bohemian audacity, taking us

to our shared beds so we could enact our dreaming. The Goan summer would have been incomplete without this intoxication, this syncretic drink that is the consequence of colonization but that has become so irremediably local it can only be drunk seasonally, under the limits of the Goan sky, with the coastal breeze drying off your sweat as each sip created a new stirring of roots.

As we prepared for the culmination—the open studio, many of us, both volunteers and artists, went around the neighborhood sticking posters and handing out invitations to the local community who formed the audience on that final evening when the resident artists staged their processbased works, some of which had the status of resolved propositions, some of which were still in-progress, marking the beginnings of promises, some resolutely meditative, more like discreet interventions, some inspired by complex mechanical permutations, yet rife with a poetic crux, some blaring out found and recorded audio, some the result of observations and discoveries, and some seductively interactive. Around or soon after midnight, as we celebrated our individual and collective achievements, the sky fittingly stirred. We danced in the street as our bodies soaked in the rain. By then we were as ripe and ready as the jackfruits.

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Zarouhie Abdalian b. 1982, lives and works in New Orleans, USA On the way to the studio in Corjeum, silk cotton floated lightly across the path. The delicate white fiber against the dried brown pre-monsoon landscape triggered an association with the cotton staple grown back home in the Deep South of the United States. I understood this image as an invitation to consider cotton’s cultivation, integral as it is to the exploitation of labor and land in pursuit of capital. I read what I could and posed simple questions to those around me—not the least of which was, where can I procure raw cotton in April in a state that does not grow it. These questions had complex answers. Orijit and Gurpreet pointed me towards the political history of the fiber in India. Bhisaji introduced me to Aditi Bhattad’s work with Gram Art Project. Aditi was able to connect me with farmers in Maharashtra (though I couldn’t make that journey). Katyayini, though Chukki, procured a bag of raw cotton from a Bangalore market. And Jagwinder Singh shared that his uncle grows the crop in Punjab, his fields painstakingly picked by women paid according to the quantity of kilos collected. From the uncle’s fields, a 20-kilo sack of cotton came via post to Shilpa’s home and was brought to Corjeum. And from all this, I made a sketch: a sack of cotton suspended, frozen in the shape and at the height it would be when carried upon the back. Making this sketch initiated investigations and friendships that are still unfolding.

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Minam Apang b. 1980, lives and works in Goa

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Shailesh BR 13

b. 1986, lives and works in New Delhi

Asli Cavusoglu

b. 1982, lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey

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Rasel Chowdhury b. 1988, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh Goa was a very known as a beach city. From outside of India, I always imagine see beach and touristic places.

Peoples go there for holiday and entertainment. I thought, workshop in Goa, that’s means whole day work and after that we’ll visit beautiful places at beachsides. But in first day of workshop I found myself in hill side Island. Beach is long far from that place.

I found this river Island Corjuem is very interesting. More or less 4 square Kilometers land fences by the river Mapuca.

Around 2 km northeast of Aldona and now accessible by modern road bridges, there is still-intact inland fort, it’s abandoned and atmospheric. Around 1705 Corjuem came

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to mark the easternmost boundary of Portugal’s colonial conquest, and this small fort was quickly built to protect the territory from raids by the Rajputs and Marathas.

Almost 2000 local peoples live there and most of them are very peaceful Christian, one beautiful Church and a school.

Peoples are generally do fishing and farming. Now days some people are start hospitality business and some are working in abroad also.

According to the local people, man-made damp for the fishing is main problem for them. Water can’t flow naturally, makes water putrid and produce mosquitos. So many

diseases are causes for it. Another big problem is garbage. For the good communication, beautiful place and fort, so many people are come to visit this wonderful Island. After the party they leave their garbage, bags and bottles on the sport. And also next village of this Island is coal mine valley, so sometimes heavy weight vehicles are move firstly.

As a documentary photographer it was fascinating to explore the locality of this place. I found lots of animals but the remarkable was seeing peacock openly. Unfortunately I can’t take a good photo of them but it was wonderful experience for me. And secondly I wanna say about dogs.

There are so many dogs. I felt every house has several dogs. It was very tough to work in early morning and evening time for these lovely dogs.

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Baptist Coelho b. 1977, lives and works in Mumbai The narratives of war and conflict are not linear but i​nstead form​​intricate trajectories. Over the last decade Baptist has tried to address these crucial and complex stories by approaching them from various perspectives.

The Portuguese conquest of Goa occurred when the governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque, captured the city in 1510. The Portuguese military constructed various forts and buildings which were designed for the defence of their territories during warfare. The Corjuem Fort was built in 1550 and was originally the property of the Bhonsle Rulers of Sawantwadi. This fort was also the starting point for Baptist’s research about the Portuguese military fortifications in Goa. The Portuguese colonists rebuilt the fort in 1705 in order to boost their defences of Panaji. In the early 1800’s, the Fort was used as a military school and was armed with a small battalion of four cannons which defended the town of Corjuem.

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Various archives, maps, photos and books on Portuguese fortifications were located at the Goa Museum and Goa State Central Library in Panjim. The Goan cartoonist Mario Miranda’s works on the Portuguese colonisers and the book Goa: A Daughter’s Story of 2005 by Maria Aurora Couto also became part of the research.

All these findings were assembled within a section of The Old Pereira House, located in the Primavera Wado hamlet of the village of Corjuem. Along with the assemblage of photos and books, graph paper was layered on an existing architectural feature which looked reminiscent of a vantage point of the Corjuem Fort, with its multiple gun ports.

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Pranay Dutta b. 1993, lives and works in Baroda All that was once directly lived has become mere representation today. With an increasingly online world, where everybody occupies digital space, the internet is a site and medium to travel to places. Goa with its position as a “tourist state” and with photogenic geography finds a metaphor in the windows wallpaper options. Places around

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the world that are mostly never identified but enamour as desktop screen savers. The work references these images of landscapes of Goa constantly recreate the enticement of Goa on the internet - a lure that leads several to the land of the sea, sun, beach and a never ending party.

Marzia Farhana b. 1985, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh A hundred year old house named ‘Old Opera house’ in Goa, India, is preserving bookshelves since 1989. These bookshelves have become a part of the archival materials of this heritage house.

The old bookshelves were full of almost 500 books. These

books are taken as a collection of words and sentences; from millions of that collection, I have cut-out lines consciously and made a poem by playing, mixing or juxtaposing them randomly. That’s how my text sculpture arrived. To begin this work I have taken the writer William S Burroughs’s ‘Cut up technique’ as a primary inspiration. Anyone can

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make this art piece by taking out texts from anywhere inside the books, and by juxtaposing them randomly. This is a playful act where there is no involvements of creativity and reduces the concept of authorship.

These texts are written on disposable silver paper palates and presented them as petal. In general plates are used to consume food. However, in this modern era most of the things now a days are produced to consume only. These texts cannot be consumed as food. One has to walk, experience, read and think; these actions lead to multiple interpretations and participations. Hence, these reinforce the sculptural quality of the texts in audiences mind.

The texts are tied to books with fence wire like petals or leaves in a tree.

They also perform a little dance while natural wind or wind of ceiling fan shake them. This installation extends from the exhibiting room to outside garden and close areas because these petal like plates are also planted in different sites and places. Thus, these texts travel from private space to outside but originated from the mother body i.e. the bookshelves.

There is a text ‘Technological devices available’ presented as moving image with a sound of the chirp of an unknown bird, refers to present condition where because of the revolution of technological progression we are in lack of natural influences. Thus technological devices are more available than nature. The texts are taken intentionally, inspired by surroundings, everyday happenings, experiences from everyday life or from absurd socio-political issues or anything that emerged interesting and so on.

American art historian and critic Hal Foster’s ideas about archive nature is ‘found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’. To conclude, taking these books as archive materials this work is an experiment of a playful act resemble as archive nature.

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Francesco Fonassi b. 1986, lives and works in Brescia, Italy Glance is a free-form environmental sound diffusion which has taken place in Corjuem, in the region of Goa, India, during Khoj residency. Batches of live recordings are diffused through three temple speakers, specialized in amplifying voice, chants and dictates, turned into a three-channel sonorization device, lasting several nights to drive a wide, intimate and hallucinatory experience.

The red laterite soil of the forest (object of big issues concernig land devastation from mining and introduction of plant species) become the medium of the sound itself: speakers are dig as much as microphones, recording and playing-back

underground, overdubbing, making the land resound.

A long stratification process started by rough vibrations out of an electrified string bow, played together with people, ended up in a sound performance for a temple speaker solo, happened at Clark House Initiative in Mumbai few days later, collecting and displacing all the recordings in a three-hour collective listening session.

A sound sculpture with residual recordings and materials from the sound performance has been installed afterwards at CSMVS Museum, Mumbai.

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Bhisaji Gadekar b. 1987, lives and works in Goa Beyond beaches and being a tourist hub, Goa has a tradition of rich art and culture of the soil. The Goan soil has given so much to the Goan people and embraced them in its land. As a sculptor, I have an experience of almost 12 years working with clay and I have built connections and friendships with many of those local craft communities who work in this field. The potter is Goa’s oldest craftsperson and pottery Goa’s oldest craft. This is how I was inspired to develop this project. There is no proper documentation on this field of work, of artisans working with clay or terracotta.

I have gathered a good energetic creative and technical

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team to work on this project with me. With this project I will continue to extend my relationships with this and communicate with them. This project is planned in different phases and levels.

Katyayini Gargi b. 1990, lives and works in Baroda and New Delhi “The Party”, 2017 : This work consists of an installation in a small room, with a box that has a floating holographic projection inside, and a set of 10 pieces of text on paper stuck around on the wall. The idea of this work stems from a play (titled “The Party”) by Marathi playwright, Mahesh Elkunchwar. It was also later made into a film. I wanted to study the nature of different behaviours of people in a given social-gathering situation and the possible reasoning behind them behaving in the way that they do. I made up ten behavioural archetypes, and listed down their reasoning with the help of text and drawings on the walls The video

in the box is a looped animation of the imagined scenario, with the aforementioned ten archetypes acting out the roles I assigned them. As the projection is holographic, the figures float in mid air and seem like they physically occupy the box which in turn becomes a maquette of a room.

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Parul Gupta b. 1980, lives and works in New Delhi My “On site” work is an inquiry around perception and cognition in architectural spaces branching out through “drawing in space” and “site conditioned installations”, where a certain site and its structural elements becomes material to work around.

Drawing in space is an inquiry about “drawing as a spatial exploration poised somewhere between installation and abstract line drawing”. It revolves around the question of “what happens when a line leaves paper and enters space”.

Resulting in drawing in space as architectural intervention

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and spatial exploration – site specific, temporary, ephemeral installation based on the language of line.

The process of drawing in space revolves around line as the subject, but after entering and working on site, psychology of the space makes in situ a phenomenological act. Working on site raises question on perception, how a particular place / space informs the way we see; how a spatial drawing changes our perception of each individual space, as well our perception of ourselves in that space.

This leads to site conditioned installations which engages with examining the relationship between architectural spaces and specific structural elements in those spaces, further locating perceptual questions on how do we perceive the environment we inhabit and what happens when a subtle shift is made in the very space which we have been experiencing in a certain way. Does that subtle shift make us question our knowledge and/or our knowing and how?

around its unique spatial character. The outside view from the window is akin to landscape painting. I intervened by perceiving this view as the base to draw upon in the empty space between window panels, by adding horizontal lines to this vertical scape. Color came as a response to the background with merging of two layers.

Medium – Fishnet Wire & Color Markers

My studio space in Pereira House for Khoj workshop was another such space which instinctually raised questions

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Lu Yang b. 1984, lives and works in Shanghai and Beijing, China The work God of the Brain is split into two sections. The first presents a traditional Veeragase dance, which originates from the legend of the Hindu god Virabhadra—the fearsome manifestation of Shiva. As in Wrathful King Kong Core, I then incorporate the legend into my own mythology of the human mind.

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Nazrin Mammadova b. 1989, lives and works in Baku, Azerbaijan In my painting and drawing practice I experiment with spontaneous, automatic and subconscious creativity. Dabbing in action painting, colour field and all the anti figurative magic in between. I personally refer to these paintings as ‘rational abstraction’. At their core they are mixed media paintings that are difficult to quantify. They often appear to be on the verge of collapse, half-finished, sometimes barely even begun, delicately balancing internal contradiction and incongruity They are also presented as components of what I characterise as the grouping of systems, a totality that is not about the balance of a thought, a final idea, an idealised end or a perceived direction, but rather a body in which things are happening – aesthetic things and longings.

That these works exhibit such heterogeneity might seem to

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damn me as an artist in search of a subject, or a painter solely preoccupied with formal effect. Yet influences and ideas such as time, space, movement and rhythm abound in these paintings even when they seem to refer to nothing outside themselves. Each of the paintings in a completely different way creates a radically abstract space of silence in the head, with a stillness that contains movements, with a presence of an absence, with something for an eye to chew on.

For an artist painting is a way of working out my thoughts.

For viewer its the way of understanding different methods or organising information. All information, visual , historical, psychological and physical also, everything.

Danushka Marasinghe b. 1985, lives and works in Colombo, Sri Lanka

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Shilpa Mayenkar b. 1981, lives and works in Goa The work shards speak About the peculiar sensation of object which once have existed. It is about memory than any specific historical event, but yet tells a story of trade and economy across the seas and the Goa ‘s colonization

by Portuguese.

It address woman’s impersonal love for crockery and kitchen objects to which they are deeply connected and

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greatly value.

Ceramic is a material with high strength, hardness and high melting temperature and at the same time delicate and fragile giving it a subtle suggestion of feminity. it is 2000 year old medium which engages you with past and the same time progressive and challenging.

Ceramic shards used in work are collected from the old Goa. History says after Portuguese occupied Goa in 1510, the Maritime trade of Goa had entered into the new phase. Old Goa had many bazar Streets dealing with varieties of commodities During this period. Broken crockery from Macau came on ship as ballast. And was discarded on Goan shores.

Exploration between the bank of river Mandovi and adjoining area brought to light Chinese ceramic shards of bowls

And cups and dishes. Majority of the shards belong to Qing and Ming dynasty (16th and 17th c.). with the help of this I have created SHARDS a .curious personal narrative about the objects which has disappeared or has changed it’s form.

But tried to make visible through the visual images .

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Sonatina Mendes b. 1983, lives and works in Baroda “Love makes you see a place differently. Just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love.If you know one landscape well, you will look at other landscapes differently.If you learn to love one place sometimes you can also learn to love another.”

– Anne Micheals (Fugitive Pieces) I look at the solar panels across my home each day and find myself constantly observing their tonalities, their greys..they look like a frozen sea, like salt pans, like endless latticesses extending to the sky.

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The ocean and the desert are sisters.

They share the genetics of vastness and infinity.

“A person will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to that individual to pull rather than push.”

–Ludwig Wittgenstein As a child I remember wandering around the surroundings of my village in Goa , looking at objects and observing natural phenomena.

Could the reflections of a steel plate be akin to the colouring of a sky at sunset?

Can the lines created by the sea from the shore to the horizon be echoed in the vents of an air conditioner?

Like the rhythm of a Philip Glass composition, the memory of an experience has the ability to manifest itself sometimes gently, sometimes rapidly, sometimes with extreme nuance. But it always seems to be sewn together by a certain trajectory of thought.

The physical world seems to offer itself up with myriad objects that give tangible shape to the intangible.

“Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place–the picture of it–stays, and not just in my memory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened“.

–Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

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Sahil Naik b. 1991, lives and works in Goa In the thick overgrowth of the Goan landscape lie debris, trapped and reclaimed by nature; decades old ‘goan’ houses born of Goan and Portuguese characteristics - thick walls plastered with lime and mud, eggs and red rock, wood, hand painted tiles and oyster shell windows. Homes - that were left empty with the great Goan exodus to the Gulf, London and other parts of Europe; and Africa in search of better opportunities. Houses where mostly the elderly stayed back, those in waiting or those who never wanted to move on. After they passed on, the houses remained in purgatory, slowly losing the physical self bit by bit, brick by brick. Over time their identity was lost, their history - few have names etched in stone, but most have lost their heritage. Over the years taps and knobs, plates and jars, furniture, windows, wood and tiles - bit by bit robbed bare. People used their empty rooms to drink, gamble, use drugs, sleep and defecate - until the eerieness of nature taking over leaves it in abandon and stories of the supernatural were attributed to them.

My work imagines these houses as eerie shelters for the unwanted to breed, like a disease inflicting creature or a mechanical monster. The work is referenced from Science fiction and comics universe and from Indian mythology; from Ayurveda (Susruta’s Compendium) and Arthashastra to HYDRA in Marvel Comics and the largely prevalent reverence for ghosts and spirits in Goa. It looks at the biological weaponry projects worldwide – the Vishkanya (the poisonous maiden) can be understood as an early concept of this thread spread across the cultural history of the East. These kinetic sculptures breathe the black of disease at their roots in the decaying debris. I work with the creation of ‘beings’ that can stimulate sensorial experiences in basic actions like breathing/gasping, sound, humidity and smell.

These beings may exist amongst us (or maybe they already do) featuring in our everyday spaces. Do we cohabit? Did we talk?

I am working on the creation a lazaretto within the space of the green house (a structure within a structure) referencing a nursery full of “Apple” trees and reimagining the space and structure as a breeding zone. Activated by human proximity the fruits of the trees (cased in lead) emanate a fragrance – as the tree continues to breathe uneasily at the roots and under the soil.

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Sergiy Petlyuk b. 1981, lives and works in Kiev, Ukraine The trip to Goa was a revelation for me. It was a discovery not only of the new territories (it was my first trip to Asia, to the East of Eastern Europe) but also of people and nature. This two-week long mixture, flow, and synergy between nature and humans became the basis of my video installation. If briefly describe visualization – it is a limited in time scanning, careful probing, introduction to something new, and filling the blanks.

This wonderful interweaving of human and natural each time turning out into new forms is exactly what I wanted to portray in my work.

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Gagan Singh b. 1975, lives and works in New Delhi I think for me it was all about doing something which i already know and then finding new ways to think. I was taken a back by the jack fruit trees and the sleepiness of being in Goa. So i went around drawing on surfaces of the homes and then felt what could be of my interest of being here.

I got interested in how far one could see in the forest. The depth of the vision and what it meant to see ‘at distance’. So i tried creating wires which could be tied to a tree branch at a distance and someone could pull them and see a gentle movement some where inside the forest. I also wanted to play with movement so i tried inserting cut outs of my hand

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drawn characters and see them in motion inside a bottle of water. I explored “drawing conversation” on the Open house where i invited people to sit with me and draw together in a sketchbook. Ive been unsure of what it means to draw on someone. So along with “drawing conversation” I also tried drawing on people. I wanted them to take the work with them, and so i was looking at leaving a mark in the house and how that was forming a sense of permanency to it. But I am more interested for the marks to disappear. So drawing on people was where even i can not see it again.

Diptej Vernekar b. 1991, lives and works in Goa The island of Corjuem overlooks the red of the hills - traces of mining that have hollowed these large red mud and rock masses over time. My work at the workshop was born in response to this landscape that I passed each day. The land which is scooped and the smoke which becomes the silent yet endless echo of a mined landscape, a wound that will never heal. Take Over was more an act of sculpting that void emotional scape.

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Special Thanks Royal Norwegian Embassy

Jagwinder Brar

Samdani Art Foundation

Pranesh Desai

Exhibit 320 Pradeep Naik

Ankit Patel

Piramal Art Foundation Theertha, Sri Lanka

Preetesh Naik

Gopika Chowfla

Rajaram Naik

Parmesh Shahani

Dhiraj Pednekar

Dr Subodh Kerkar

Nikhil Kavlekar

Studio 215

Akheel Kavlekar

Sovi Studios

Rajan Mardolkar

Museum of Goa

Rahul Popaniya

Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam Pooja Sood Madkaikar Builders

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Rahul Gawde

About Khoj International Artists’ Association Khoj International Artists’ Association is a not- for-profit, contemporary art organisation based in New Delhi, which provides physical, intellectual and financial support for artists and creative practitioners. Through a variety of programmes including workshops, residencies, exhibitions, talks, and community art projects Khoj has built an international reputation as outstanding alternative arts incubation space. Since 1997, Khoj has developed itself as a unique ‘art lab’, and has supported the experimentation of many leading Indian and International artists. It plays a central role in the advance of experimental, interdisciplinary, and critical contemporary art practice in India– constantly challenging the established thinking about art.

About Por Mar Collective The Por Mar Collective, or the Collective by the Sea, is largely driven by the phenomena of Becoming of Goa and the gradual transition of Arts, Society and Culture between its colonial history and modern challenges of the state. Goa has anchored and harboured trade and exchange across the Indian Ocrean world enabling a multicultural present.

The members of the group in their diverse practices contemplate the politics of the future and broader themes of memory, diaspora, disaster, displacement and migration throughout history and today. The Working Group is comprised of six young emerging Goan artists living and practising in Goa.