Khoj Khabar (Volume 8) by Khoj International Artists' Association

KHABAR

JULY 2018 - DECEMBER 2019

VOL. 8

KHOJ.

(to) search, hunt, explore, discover, discern, seek, inquire, trace, track, quest, research, investigate.

Khoj began as a proposition: a space for artists, run by artists.

Khoj aims to connect creative practitioners & catalyse interdisciplinary collaborations and experimentation to create new possibilities of art and art-making. It also seeks to build networks and informed audiences who engage critically with contemporary art in India. In its uncompromising commitment to support creative thinking by building an institutional infrastructure in India for making, exhibiting and researching contemporary art, Khoj is creating a unique legacy for the future.

The past 18 months have been a time of deep introspection at Khoj. Reflecting on the reasons Khoj began 22 years ago, its journey as it tried to make meaning of a variety of new genres and spaces in between, as well as its position in the cultural landscape, it seemed necessary, if not urgent, to question our role and responsibility in the current socio-political scenario. The notions of ‘evidence’ and ‘truth’ have been leitmotifs in Khoj’s programming in the last few years. Following the staged performance, Landscape as Evidence: Artist as Witness, and the exhibition, Evidence Room, in 2017, Khoj curated the exhibition, This Must be True, in January 2019. While war songs and poetry resonated through the Khoj corridors as acts of witnessing during the exhibition, audiences immersed themselves in an understanding of surveillance technologies, censorship, online cultures, and truth and evidence in the age of deep fakes and AI during the Aesthetic Warfare symposium held in collaboration with Digital Earth at Khoj later in the year.

Khoj is deeply committed to creating a learning space for artists and audiences alike, where learning occurs through practice, conversations, and more structured pedagogic programmes. Its flagship residency programme for young and emerging artists, Peers, completed its 16th edition in 2019. In 2018-19, Khoj completed the second and third editions of its relatively new curatorial fellowship programme, Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) – where each edition comprises a two-week intensive programme for young curators from across South Asia and Iran, followed by an exhibition by the fellows. The exhibitions, the earth is still going around the sun by CISA 2018 fellows, and Playlist of Propositions by CISA 2019 fellows, were held in December 2018 and 2019, respectively. With the intellectual and financial support of the Goethe-Institut in India, the CISA programme is fast establishing itself as an important curatorial training ground for young/emerging curators in South Asia. While the artist and art making has been central to Khoj, its pioneering art management programme, ArThinkSouthAsia (ATSA), which builds capacity for cultural organisations by training cultural practitioners in south Asia and Iran, celebrated its tenth year in 2019! With an alumni network of over 150 fellows across South Asia and several short courses held in Kabul, Tehran, Dhaka, Goa and Pune among other cities in the past decade, ATSA is now set to move in new directions. We are delighted to have Ruchira Das, an ATSA 2015 fellow, join us as deputy director of ATSA in September 2019. Over the past 17 years, Khoj has been actively involved in curating art in public spaces. In particular, it has supported several art-based community projects and social interventions in its local neighbourhood of Khirkee. Over time, what began as sporadic interventions developed into more sustained and meaningful engagements with the local community. Khirkee Voice, our bi-lingual, hyper-local zine,

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

an artistic project by Malini Kochupillai and Mahavir Singh Bisht, has officially completed three years. By negotiating the diverse and complex socio-economic reality of Khirkee, it has tried to give a voice to several people, bridge differences, and build friendships in an otherwise fraught neighbourhood. It is a host of such projects that have made a small but palpable difference to Khoj’s unique community and have led us to deepen our enquiry into art practices that are ‘socially engaged’. Peripheries & Crossovers: Art as Social Practice – supported by the Ford Foundation and now in its first year – is a three-year, multi-city project in peri-urban spaces across India, that seeks to find artistic strategies, whereby artists can embed creative practices and artistic processes in civil society organisations to effect change at the intersection of gendered violence and urbanism. As the year drew to a close, we were honoured to learn that we were named the recipients of a network partnership grant by the prestigious Prince Claus Foundation. Over the next three years, the grant will allow Khoj to sharpen its decade-long engagement with ecological issues and socially engaged art practice by supporting a public art project focused on the critical issue of climate-justice. Thus, as we stand at the brink of a new decade, there is no doubt that several new challenges will emerge. There will be many questions, and many will have no easy answers. But for now, we are committed to grappling with how to transition from the question of what art can do to what art should do.

Pooja Sood December 2019 6

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

November December

SENSIBLE PHENOMENON Public Talk by Cécile Beau

CISA Exhibitions PLAYLIST OF PROPOSITIONS

January - March January (ongoing)

THIS MUST BE TRUE Khoj Exhibition

PERIPHERIES & CROSSOVERS Art as Social Practice

2019

November

October

ECHOLOCATION by Ifie Sin

SAFE SPACES / UNSAFE TIMES Support Systems in a Suspended World

October

KHIRKEE VOICE completes 3 years

September

August

BODY IN TRANSIT by Surabhi Saraf

DJ MMA TSELENG Sound Immersions

August

July

AI FOR SURVIVAL Public Talk by Nishant Shah

CURATORIAL INTENSIVE SOUTH ASIA (CISA) Residential Intensive 2018

2018

November November December

INDOOR-OUTDOOR Dancewalks with Foofwa d’Imobilité

CISA Exhibitions THE EARTH IS STILL GOING AROUND THE SUN

August

July

May-June

FOREST TALES Artist Talk and Motion Picture Performance by Anuj Vaidya

SOLO DANCE COMPETITION

CURATORIAL INTENSIVE SOUTH ASIA (CISA) Residential Intensive 2019

PEERS 2019

May

April - May

ARTHINK SOUTH ASIA (ATSA) 2019

DIGITAL EARTH SYMPOSIUM Aesthetic Warfare

April - May

February

ANOTHER LIFE IS POSSIBLE Solo Exhibition by Jithinlal NR

MKM Sound Immersions

THIS MUST BE TRUE 28 January - 11 March 2019

Sahil Naik’s Ground Zero

In the world and in the exhibition space, we are implicated in the twin acts of spectatorship and participation. This exhibition questioned the delight, revulsion, anxiety, and conviction in our practices of mass witnessing.

EXHIBITION

THIS MUST BE TRUE

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Level of Confidence

curators: Mario D’Souza, Mila Samdub, Radha Mahendru

Ala Younis’s Pat – riot – against the slow cancellation of the future

artists: Ala Younis, Bani Abidi, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Pallavi Paul, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sahil Naik, Superflex, Susan Schuppli, Zuleikha Chaudhari + Khoj

EXHIBITION

Bani Abidi’s Memorial to Lost Words

Khoj’s curatorial enquiry of this exhibition located itself in the disquiet of the strange shifts our worlds are undergoing. In the tangle of surveillance, big data, algorithms, and post-truth politics, we continually produce, document, and archive ourselves as consenting and unwitting subjects. From spaces of stillness and action, the works in the exhibition posited witnesses that are romantic, non-sentient, voyeuristic, under threat, and incarcerated.

THIS MUST BE TRUE

Ala Younis’s Pat – riot – against the slow cancellation of the future

Khoj staged a public hearing in 2017, titled Landscape as Evidence: Artist as Witness, conceived by Khoj International Artists’ Association and Zuleikha Chaudhari and developed with lawyer Anand Grover and artists Ravi Agarwal, Sheba Chhachhi and Navjot Altaf. Hoping to provide alternatives to established social, political, and economic narratives, the hearing presented art as evidence and artists as witnesses in a simulated court of law. Opening with a video of these proceedings, This Must Be True complicated the very act of witnessing in the collapsing gulf between law and aesthetics.

EXHIBITION

Pallavi Paul’s Attempts, Incitements, Etc

Susan Schuppli’s Slick Images and Nature Represents Itself

Artwork by Superflex

Susan Schuppli’s Slick Images and Nature Represents Itself

RESIDENCY

Artwork by Anju Acharya

Artwork by Intiyaz Ansari

PEERS Artwork by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

20 May - 20 June 2019 Open Day: 20 June 2019

PEERS

Artwork by Umesh Sigh

A forum for experimentation, exchange, and dialogue for emerging artists across India, the residency – one of Khoj’s pioneering programmes – has been creating a network of young and emerging artists working across mediums.

Artwork by Anju Acharya

A varied range of practices were witnessed during the 16th edition of our annual four-week residency. Niyati Dave’s critical reflection gave us an insight into the artists’ processes – Anju Acharya’s voyeuristic vision into the intimate experience of pregnancy, Gurjeet Singh creating a sensorium, Umer Singh’s play on the colour indigo and the bleakness of the agrarian crisis, Intiyaz Ansari stripping the cow off her the divine form, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s juxtaposition of cacophonic excess of urban food systems with consumption in domestic spaces. As part of the residency, the artists had the opportunity to visit the studios of Thukral and Tagra, Raqs Media Collective, Sohrab Hura, and to receive mentorship from Pallavi Paul and Radha Mahendru. Peers is supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. PEERS

Artists-in-residence: Anju Acharya, Umesh Singh, Intiyaz Ansari, Sabyasachi Bhattacharjee, Gurjeet Singh

Artwork by Gurjeet Singh

Critic-in-residence: Niyati Dave

RESIDENCY

PEERS SHARE As tradition goes, the two-day Peers Share seminar follows the Peers Open Day. For the artists who qualify for the final round of Peers, the seminar becomes a great learning opportunity. Artists showcase their own practice and get valuable feedback and criticism from their peers, senior art practitioners, and the Khoj curatorial team. This year, Peers Share included an application and proposal writing workshop, led by Sabih Ahmed in collaboration with FICA (Foundation for Indian Contemporary art). Peers Share is supported by Tarana Sawhney.

Artists: Adhiraj Singh, Aniruddha Parit, Debadyuti Saha, Aadit Basu, Garima Thakur, Maksud Ali Mondal, Mariraj R, Mathew Dominic, Pranay Dutta, Rahul Chauhan.

PEERS

DIGITAL EARTH SYMPOSIUM: AESTHETIC WARFARE 01 - 03 May 2019

SYMPOSIUM

A three-day session exploring the notion of Aesthetic Warfare and questioning the power of visuals in the age of the post truth – from AI distributing visual propaganda, to deep fakes invading our timelines, from new aesthetic strategies of internet activism, to art in the age of post truth.

Contributions: Sajjad Anwar, Heba Y. Amin, Valia Fetisov, Sepideh Majidi, Padmini Ray Murray, Mohammad Salemy, Nishant Shah, Radha Mahendru, Renee Roukens, Ala Younis, Khyati Saraf and Ishita Sharma

DIGITAL EARTH

SYMPOSIUM

Exhibition still: by Digital Earth Fellows Sepideh Majidi, Khyati Saraf and Ishita Sharma

Every day, we see more than 5,000 images, either around us or on our devices. Artificial Intelligence today helps distribute visual propaganda, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Globally, people are being attacked by false imagery, fake video footage, misleading memes, and visual disinformation campaigns – all intended to deceive public opinion. At the same time, artists and activists are using aesthetics to fight back in social and urban environments in order to help us navigate this complexity and to regain a sense of human agency and understanding. The Digital Earth Symposium was divided into two components – Knowledge Studio, a closed-door, co-creating workshop during the day and Symposium, an open-door evening session that comprised lectures, performances, talks and panel discussions. Digital Earth Knowledge Studio: A co-created, co-owned, collaborative space that worked to think through creative and critical knowledge, strategies, practices, and tactics to develop iterative knowledge frameworks. Thinking through the framework of a paranoid subject (as opposed to an anxious one), each participant was invited to choose a concept/keyword/ story/case-study/work/practice/process towards a rough-and-ready living knowledge product for further iterative development. Taking artistic work, impulses, practice, research, creation, and making as points of departure, the knowledge studio attempted to develop a suite of concepts, hacks, stories, and strategies to flesh out this notion of aesthetic warfare and hold (post)truth to power. The symposium kicked off with a small exhibition by Digital Earth fellows, Sepideh Majidi, Khyati Saraf and Ishita Sharma, who showcased their fellowship research through the exhibitions. The event was organised in partnership with Digital Earth, the Netherlands.

DIGITAL EARTH

AI FOR SURVIVAL Public Talk by Nishant Shah 02 August 2018

PUBLIC TALK

Nishant Shah is committed to producing and expanding public and open infrastructures for digital connectivity, networking, mobilisation, and organisation towards resilient lives, equitable societies, and inclusive futures. The Dean of Graduate School at ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands, his research, education, learning, and activism lies at the intersections of material digital technologies, identity politics, emergent political organisation, and connected critical learning. One of the most visible emphasis in the social acceleration of Artificial Intelligence is what he calls “extinction impulses”. This manifests itself in multiple ways – in how we design-think problems, how we conceptualise our users, how we buy into the promise of AI, and how we imagine digital capital and Silicon Valley-fueled visions, current digital developments, and how AI in particular perpetuates myths which we perceive as natural. In the public talk, he showed how a feminist and postcolonial critique of these myths, and the alternatives they provide, make it a more hopeful, inclusive, and humane way of building worlds that are made for survival.

Programs like the Digital Earth Symposium and the talk on AI For Survival helped us develop our continuing interest in looking at surveillance technologies, online cultures, and truth and evidence in the age of deep fakes and AI. AI FOR SURVIVAL

CURATORIAL INTENSIVE SOUTH ASIA

Exhibition view: The Body as Archive by Sumedha Bhattacharya and Hediyeh Azma

For three years, Khoj, in partnership with Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, has been committed to developing a network of young and emerging curators across South Asia and Iran. It has brought together curators from the region to foster discourse and provide structural and experimental inquiry into the possibilities of curatorial practice.

PROGRAMME

CISA

Making Place by Aziz Sohail

ilâj by Yasaman Tamizkar

Dis-place by Pranamita Borgohain

CISA RESIDENTIAL INTENSIVE

The second and the third edition of CISA, 2018 and 2019, respectively, were led by art historian and curator, Dr. Leonhard Emmerling, who was joined by curator Natasha Ginwala for the second edition, and by curator Latika Gupta for the third. A curatorial fellowship for emerging curators from South Asia, CISA is structured in two phases. The CISA Residential Intensive, which is the first phase of the fellowship, is a two-week intensive programme at Khoj Studios that invites tutors and special lecturers with various specialisations and engagements in artistic, curatorial, thinking, writing and research practices. In both, the 2018 and 2019 editions, histories of exhibition making, institutions and their limitations were looked at through a combination of talks, seminars, and workshops. Emerging discussions incorporated a varied range of curatorial frameworks and practices – non-instrumental knowledge that drew from various themes – patches of ideas that can lend themselves to varied contexts. They helped further the intent of CISA to develop a diversity of perspectives on the medium of the exhibition and to provide both, a structured and an experimental inquiry into the possibilities of curatorial practice today. 30

PROGRAMME

Past Doesn’t Have Any Vanishing Point by Shimul Saha

CISA EXHIBITIONS

In the second phase of CISA, each fellow gets the opportunity to independently develop curatorial projects over a period of six months, during which they are mentored by the programme leaders, culminating in exhibitions in December of that year. Khoj saw the culmination of two exciting clusters of 13 exhibitions clusters in the two editions of CISA: Playlist of Propositions in 2018 and the earth is still going around the sun in 2019. These curatorial projects were compiled into a publication and executed within the premises of Khoj Studios and Studio Khirki for the 2018 exhibition, and at the India International Center (IIC) in 2019. CISA

CISA 2018 Participants: Anuj Daga (India), Aziz Sohail (Pakistan), Hediyeh Azma (Iran), Naveen Mahantesh (India), Nayomi Apsara (Sri Lanka), Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati (Nepal), Rahul Gudipudi (India), Sania Galundia (India), Sharareh Bajaria (Nepal), Shimul Saha (Bangladesh), Sumedha Bhattarcharya (India), Sumitra Sunder (India), Yasaman Tamizkar (Iran)

The Unspoken Word by Rahul Gudipudi

Tutors and Lecturers: Leonard Emmerling, Natasha Ginwala, Kavita Singh, Nancy Adjania, Anita Dube, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Leonard Emmerling, Kavita Singh, Annapurna Garimella, Naman Ahuja, Sabih Ahmed, Sneha Raghavan, Pooja Sood, Abhay Sardesai and Vishal K Dar

EXHIBITION

05 - 10 December 2018

Sediments: Resisting Anonymity by Sharareh Bajracharya

PLAYLIST OF PROPOSITIONS

The projects in this cluster covered a range of concerns, addressing issues regarding communal and personal identity, memory, construction, and emerging urbanism in contemporary South Asia – South Asian cities as place for longing, hope and becoming, built environment and urbanism, the complex manifestation of queer desires in the digital age, the archival body, creating a visual archive of the women’s movement in Nepal, a collective listening of the Unspoken word, belonging, communities remembering histories and enacting resistance. PLAYLIST OF PROPOSITIONS

CISA 2019

Tutors and Lecturers: Leonard Emmerling, Latika Gupta, Tapati Guha Thakurta, Vidya Shivadas, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Anita Dube, Jyotindra Jain, Naman P. Ahuja, Gayatri Sinha, Pooja Sood, Urvashi Butalia, Sneha Raghavan, Ranjit Hoskote, Shai Heredia, Dayanita Singh, Ravi Agarwal, Radha Mahendru and Abhay Saradesai.

GHAR by Sadia Marium

Participants: Alisha Sett (India), Ashima Tshering (India) , Ayushma Regmi (Nepal), Diwas Raja (Nepal), Maryam Bagheri (Iran), Mila Samdub (India), Poulomi Paul (India) Pranamita Borgohain (India), Rumi Samadhan (India), Sadia Marium (Bangladesh), Sarker Protick (Bangladesh), Kirubalini Stephan (Srilanka) , Zohreh Deldadeh (Iran)

EXHIBITION

THE EARTH IS STILL GOING AROUND THE SUN 14 - 20 December 2019

The 2019 CISA exhibition captured multiplicities in chaos and coalition. In these 13 exhibitions, by curators across South Asia and Iran, one encountered worlds made of memories, identities, pasts, erasures, technologies and even humour. These exhibitions, through their own world-making, attempted to invoke a notion of home – ‘empire of cotton’, anticipation of human catastrophe, ‘real time’, charting out histories of extra-territorial living, migration, marginalisation and erasure, questions around mental health and the sociopolitical and physical world, the body – both in its physicality, and a conceptual notion – and tensions between the idea of ‘home’ and the ‘world’ itself. The 2019 CISA exhibition was held in collaboration with the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi.

Real Time Tactics by Mila Samdub

Curatorial Intensive South Asia was organised in partnership with Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan.

THE EARTH IS STILL GOING AROUND THE SUN

ARTHINK SOUTH ASIA ATSA 2019 28 April - 12 May 2019 A management, policy, and research programme in the arts and cultural sector. Ruchira Das, ATSA 2015 fellow, has come on board as the Deputy Director of the programme. The tenth year of ATSA marked a full circle, with a decade of supporting a cadre of arts managers committed to the cause of capacity building in the South Asian region, and the impact on planning and development of sustainable cultural organisations.

“It is incredible to think that it has been 10 years since the first ATSA Fellowship programme. I first participated in this programme as a fellow in 2015 and as a Deputy Director for the last one year, have begun to truly appreciate the value that this programme brings to the cultural ecosystem in this part of the world. With the growth in arts organisations and cultural spaces, it is the need of the hour for more of us to be equipped with arts management skills”. Ruchira Das, Deputy Director ATSA 36

PROGRAMME

The first phase of ATSA 2019 took place in May 2019. This residential training included intensive modules in strategic planning, cultural policy, marketing and communications, fundraising, HR and Finance. Following the residential course, the fellows went on a four-week secondment best suited to their professional interest in cultural organisation in Germany, UK or South Asia. A short course was conducted on ‘Fundamentals of Arts Management’ from 19 - 21 April 2019 at Dhaka, Bangladesh, in collaboration with Bengal Arts Programme, and another on ‘Fundamentals of Arts Management’ in Pune, India, from 13 - 15 September 2019 in collaboration with Gyaan Adab.

ATSA 2019 Fellows:

Abhinit Khanna

Asifuzzaman Khan

Fort Arts Center

Bangladesh, Dhaka International FolkFest

Aditi Zacharias The Museum of Kerala History

Govind Parajuli Nepal, Mandala Theatre

Anuradha Pathak The Centre for Arts and Social Practice

Gayatri Nair Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation

Komal Chamling ARTEM

Shridhar Hegde Keremane Yakshagana Kalakendra

Veda Aggarwal Calcutta Classical Guitar Society

Vivek Chockalingam Walkin Studios

ATSA

Ghulam Reza Haydary Afghanistan, Bamyan’s Culture and Art House

Kazi Tahsin Agaz Bangladesh, The Daily Star newspaper

Maryam Malmir Iran, Maha Group and Tarab

Mohammad Karim Asir Afghanistan, Parwana Cultural & Artistic Theatre Organization

Shahana Parveen Bangladesh, Center for Communication and Development

FROM THE ARCHIVES

MODINAGAR WORKSHOP 1997

The India of 1997, when Khoj began, was a very different place. It was a time before McDonald’s and Barista cafés were part of our urbanscape; before high-speed internet and communication technologies radically altered our perceptions of work and play; before the existence of plush galleries and a seemingly networked art world, high on energy, anxiety and celebration; before artists and gallerists raced between Basel and Shanghai, and international curators, once a rarity, were ubiquitously present in the Indian subcontinent. In 1997, our encounter with international art was limited to exhibitions brought in by the cultural arms of foreign embassies or the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and opportunities to travel abroad came only via personal invitations or scholarships offered by the Inlaks Foundation and Charles Wallace Trust. Public museums were apathetic and the few commercial galleries that existed extremely conservative. The spotlight was not on India. We felt ‘third world’, isolated, on the periphery. 38

Kaushik Mukhopadhyay, Khoj Modinagar 1998

Bastienne Kramer, Khoj Modinagar 1998

Mica Marsh, Khoj Modinagar 1998

Within this milieu, Khoj as an ‘idea’ was made tangible by the first workshop held in Modinagar, on the outskirts of New Delhi, for two weeks in 1997. The gathering of 24 mid-career artists – half local, half international – resulted in a dynamic explosion of energies – a crucible that catalysed and configured new imaginings. Working together, drinking, dancing and debating, the workshop encouraged experimentation, stimulated conversations, threw up discomforts and differences, but nevertheless forged contacts that extended well beyond the limits of time and place.

Harsha, Khoj Modinagar 1998

‘Our aim was to function as an experimental art laboratory that would bring artists together from different parts of the country, from the subcontinent and from around the globe, setting up a co-operative, non-hierarchical work situation where dialogue, exchange and transfer of information, energy and skills could take place as an intensely lived experience.’

Anita Dube, Khoj Modinagar 1997

As Anita Dube, one of the founding members, wrote in the very first Khoj catalogue in 1997:

Fuji Horoshi, Khoj Modinagar 1998

ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

PERIPHERIES & CROSSOVERS January 2019 As an art organisation committed to creating cultural shifts and social change through affect-driven creative interventions, Khoj has always played a central role in the development of experimental, interdisciplinary and critical contemporary art practice in India. We have witnessed how artistic interventions have been able to address problems of urban inequality and intolerance in small but palpable ways. Khoj’s move to Khirkee Extension in 2012 filliped our engagements with community-based art projects and social interventions, by inviting artists to push their practices in collaboration with the Khirkee community. With a Ford Foundation grant in 2018, Khoj expanded its socially engaged art practices to multiple cities across the country by working with artists addressing cultural norms and narratives around gender and urbanisation across India. Through these socially engaged art projects, we are keen to think through ways in which artists can embed creative practices into civil society organisations and work collaboratively to effectively reach out to the marginalised groups. This is a pilot project and the first year of a three-year long grant. In our first year, we are supporting four year-long projects in Kerala, Goa, West Bengal and Kapashera (a tenement town that lies at the cusp of Delhi and Gurgaon). These projects are being carried out in collaboration with local communities and a network of stakeholders/partners, which include civil society organisations. The project outcome will be realised within the community, with the possibility of an afterlife. Through these projects, the aim is to demonstrate the value of art-based interventions and creative strategies for social change. Peripheries & Crossovers is supported by The Ford Foundation, New Delhi.

ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

PERIPHERIES & CROSSOVERS

Extra Time Princess Pea Princess Pea’s practice has evolved with its relationship with diverse women across age groups over the past decade, looking at participants through the lens of gender and urbanisation. Over the past year-anda-half, she worked with women in certain communities in Goa through a range of short-term programmes. This began with a project that enabled women to document oral histories and to come to terms with dissatisfaction, abuse, aspirations,

and the lack of opportunities through the act of writing/image making. The project addresses the lack of access, as girls have very few opportunities to play high school sports. The project will develop a series of interventions over nine months, through football sessions, workshops, health classes, and conversations with parents and young girls. The artist will be engaging in conversations with the participating girls and their parents

ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

regarding access and infrastructure. Alternately, the artist is using the idea of Princess Pea and the bulbous head to think through social stigma and body issues. Girls, especially teenage girls, are often discouraged from playing due to the way their bodies are developing. Even simple aspects, such as falling and getting hurt, is discouraged. Discrimination based on the real, or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity of female athletes also persists.

with members of the NGO and the girls to develop the “contents” of this kit – including exercises and identity-based workshops, thinking through clothing and gear. She hopes to stage matches around Goa, mostly in public schools as intervention/conversation starters.

The artistic project will, in itself, develop through the making of a ‘kit’ that resonates with sport but also ideas of survival. The artist will work

PERIPHERIES & CROSSOVERS

ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

Gendered Spaces Sumona Chakravarty and Nilanjan Das North Kolkata’s lanes and bylanes are always full of life, with groups of people out on the streets playing cards, doing aerobics, romancing by the ghats, or indulging in an adda on the rowaks. As random and chaotic as it may seem, there are defined norms and traditions that shape the interactions in these public spaces, especially with regard to gendered behaviours. Nilanjan Das and Sumona Chakravarty, along with Srota Dutta, are engaging with these unique public and semi-public spaces, and the people occupying them, through a series of frames – memory, codes, space, and movement. Each frame represents an encounter that tries to build perspectives on how these spaces are shaped by gender norms and gendered behaviours. For

PERIPHERIES & CROSSOVERS

instance, a mapping exercise at the ghats with couples explores the spatial elements that create safety and comfort for couples, while an interactive signage explores the accepted codes for behaviour. A word game at a local park triggers a conversation on how men, women, and others should or can occupy public space. A light box at the local men’s club is a tool for exploring how their icons Baahubali and Vivekananda shape their understanding of masculinity. Each encounter or frame will lead to the next one, slowly, hopefully, shifting perspectives on gender identities and gendered codes of behaviour. At each space, the artists try to leave behind a trace of these encounters that can be owned and re-appropriated by their collaborators.

Otherworlds Sumedha Garg and Nitin Bathla Otherworlds is a socially engaged art project located in Kapashera, a tenement town of about 2,50,000 industrial migrants between Delhi and Gurgaon. In their engagement with the community, the artists attempt to work with the memory of the place through urban ecology, and material production, and address the othering and gendering of migrants from Bihar and UP. The project began by establishing a safe space for children and women – a former unused industrial loft converted into a community art space through the joint efforts of the artists and the community. This safe space, ‘Studio Otherworlds’, becomes a portal for further engagement with the community. In time, children and women from the community have started to use the space to collectivise and express narratives through the medium of stitching, storytelling, gardening, and drawing. The artists organise

interventions in the space to trigger collective community inquiry, along with local CSOs such as Edible Routes and Sakhi Kala Manch. The inquiry, A Planetary Map of Fast Fashion, by the artists with the Seven Sisters (Saat Saheliya) Collective from the community, is a project of collective critical cartography to disentangle the material, ecological and social memory of Kapashera. The 6-meter long by 3-meter high map uses the agricultural footprint of Kapashera to tell the story of this planetary entanglement. The map projects and connects distant spaces on the planet that are linked by the movement of commodities and capital, and of people. On the fabric of the map, the women embroider their journeys, memories, anxieties, and desires, which will form a part of further engagement and interventions between the community and the artists.

ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

PERIPHERIES & CROSSOVERS

Sweet Maria Monument: Queer Futures Aryakrishnan A crucible of remembrance for a friend, Aryakrishnan’s Sweet Maria Monument is an archive and a performance-based ode to Maria, a trans person who was murdered for being an activist. The project aims to engage with art/ cultural practitioners, activists, institutions, cultural theorists, and LGBTQI communities primarily in Kerala. By bringing together such a

diverse set of actors in the remaking of Sweet Maria Monument, the artist proposes the creation of a temporary community around creative practice and queerness. The monument has happened in academic and art places. By re-placing and re-making it with the very community it talks about, the artist proposes dialogic encounters and active participation to enable further conversations on art and life. What do the queer futures look like?

ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

How do sexual minority communities enact the life they envision for themselves and others? How do they partake in the cultural process? The artist proposes the remaking of the Sweet Maria Monument, followed by a series of workshops in different locations in Kerala. The idea behind the workshops is Queerness as Coexistence and Collaboration as a mode of practice, a way of living. The hope is to nurture a culture of creative communities of senses around the idea of the monument, which is not

PERIPHERIES & CROSSOVERS

necessarily an art community or a queer community, but to develop a queer practice which is not essential at one time, but also constituted by other marginal identities and positions. Thus, Sweet Maria Monument can remain as a ‘monere’, a mode of life and practice. The floating movement can also take the shape of a space, where some of the works and library can be stationed. The space could act as a meeting place, possibly creating a model for spaces for creative queer communities

ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

CONVERSATIONS & CROSSOVERS 08 November 2019 As part of Peripheries & Crossovers, Khoj hosted Conversations & Crossovers: art as social practice, with artists and civil society organisations as a creative forum for dialogue and exchange. During this day-long meeting, we explored strategies and methodologies through which artists and civil society organisations explore the possibilities of collaborative work for social change. These conversations are imperative to understand the role of art, not only in civil society building but also in addressing issues around gender and urbanisation. Khoj also used this opportunity to understand the process adopted by CSOs and NGOs to unpack projects that lie at the intersection of art and social practice. The space for expression and discourse is rapidly shrinking in the current social-political scenario. Conversations & Crossovers was a way to traverse through these challenging times by initiating a dialogue between artists and social-impact organisations to collectively think through art practice being socially-engaged and relational at the same time. It was a sharing platform for building alternate vocabularies and questioning the role of art for social change. Can artistic processes help us ask difficult questions differently? The convening at Khoj Studios was a closed-door interaction, attended by the artists Khoj supports as a part of Peripheries & Crossovers: art as social practice, and a few representatives from CSOs and NGOs across India that work on issues around gender injustice, urbanisation, and land rights.

SYMPOSIUM

ROCKEFELLER PARTNERSHIP

As part of the selection process for the 2020-2021 residency at the Bellagio Center , Khoj invited Nusrat Jamil and Razi Ahmed (Lahore Literary Festival, Pakistan), Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam (White Crane Films, India), Mi You (China), Anjeline de Dios (Philippines), and Erin Gleeson (Cambodia) as collaborating partners to nominate key artists, writers, musicians, dancers and other creative practitioners

from their regions. The pool of 37 nominees were reviewed by an international jury of Gridthiya Gaweewong, Els van der Plas, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Urvashi Butalia at Khoj on April 19, 2019, followed by a secondary review by the international jury assembled at the Rockefeller Foundation. 13 artists were shortlisted by the jury out of which Andrew Brook (philosopher, author and academic; Canada), Anocha Suwichakornpong (filmmaker, director, producer; Thailand), and Anil Ananthaswamy (journalist; India) have been awarded the 2020-21 residency at the Bellagio Center. For 2019-20 residency at the Bellagio Center Ho Tzu Nyen (artist, Singapore), Yazan Khalili (architect and visual artist, Palestine), Wu Mali (artist, Taiwan) and Pors&Rao (artist duo, Bangalore) were selected as the awardees.

Rockefeller Jury with Khoj Team, 2019

In 2015 Khoj International Artists’ Association began its collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation. to identify and nominate mid-career and senior artists and creative practitioners within Asia for the Bellagio Centre Residency Program in Italy. Khoj in partnership with the Rockefeller also aimed to facilitate an experience where practitioners could interact with the rich diversity of intellectuals at the Bellagio Centre, thereby giving due recognition to, and enabling new possibilities and opportunities for artists from the greater Asia region. In the period between 2016-19, 19 artists across Asia have been awarded the residency. These were selected out of 154 artists with the help of 15 jurists and 27 partnering organisations across Asian countries.

Khoj Team, 2019

NETWORK PARTNER

PRINCE CLAUS FUND We are honored and excited to announce that Khoj has been selected as a new network partner of the Prince Claus Fund. Established in 1996, the Fund is a tribute to HRH Prince Claus’s dedication to culture and development. Khoj is honoured to be a part of Prince Claus Fund’s Network Partner Committee along with Tbilisi Photo Festival (Georgia) and Studio 8 (Jordan). As per the Prince Claus Fund Foundation, 'Network Partnership Grants are selected based on an annual Call for Proposals and active scouting by the Fund in order to identify relevant cultural initiatives doing ground-breaking work in the field of culture and development. The purpose of the Network Partnership Grant is to enable pioneering work and to secure longevity of excellent institutions in the working remit of the Fund.' Khoj Director, Pooja Sood, attended the first network meeting in Amsterdam, in December 2019. The Grant will support a Khoj initiative for the next three years. CONVERSATIONS & CROSSOVERS

ANOTHER LIFE IS POSSIBLE Jithinlal NR 25 April - 12 May 2019

Jithtinlal NR was the recipient of the inaugural edition of the Artists for Artists grant supported by Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta. The exhibition, Another Life is Possible, was a culmination of the project supported by the grant. Jithinlal’s work explored Dalit history and raised questions on representation in its relation to identity. Since everything we find on Dalit history in Indian historiography is biased or tinted with the casteist and/or colonial gaze, their traces perhaps only remain in folk songs and stories – a documentation of the slave castes

A view of Jithinlal NR’s solo exhibit Another Life is Possible

A solo exhibition supported by the Artist for Artist grant.

EXHIBITION

by themselves. The fantasmatic field that Stuart Hall mentions in his essay on cultural identity was a point of departure for this exhibition. Fiction and imagination were strong springboards in narrativising the self within and in the world we live in. Most of Jithinlal’s resources came from earlier representations and the popular, which was improvised and appropriated into his own stories. With this, he claimed, came the other humongous task of the freed slave castes thrown in to modernity to identify themselves with the narratives of the resistance, or the image of a free man.

Khoj continues to expand the possibilities for art making in the region, and the increasing need to support young artists demonstrating innovation and excellence in artistic practice, by encouraging risk and experimentation. This programme focuses on supporting artists in their individual attempts to realise an on-going body of work.

ANOTHER LIFE IS POSSIBLE

INDOOR-OUTDOOR Dancewalks with Foofa d’Imobilité 04 and 06 December 2019

Foofwa d’Imobilité is a Swiss dancer, performer, choreographer, dance teacher, and the artistic director of Compagnie Neopost Foofwa. A dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Foofwa d’Imobilité began his career as a choreographer in 1998 in New York, and founded the Neopost Foofwa Company in Geneva in 2000. His latest project, Dancewalks, has seen him dance more than 600 kilometers in France, Italy, Russia, China, South Africa, and now India.

Alizée Sourbé in Retrospectives

A hybrid between walking and dancing, Dancewalks are dance as voyage. Dancewalking is a dance that always travels through space: either outdoors, dancing through several kilometers, or indoors, dance-ambulating within a closed space.

PERFORMANCE

In the Outdoor Dancewalk, the interaction with the city or the landscape became poetry. The audience walked along or joined the Dancewalk, shattering the dividing line between performer and spectator. Each person in the energetic and joyous group could reaffirm their dancing personality. The whole experience became a celebration of freedom. The Outdoor Dancewalk involved dancing through a part of a city. Accompanied by dancers of his company, local dancers, musicians and artists, as well as inviting anybody to

Foofwa d’Imobilité in the Outdoor Dancewalk

At Khoj Studios, the Dancewalks were initiated by the Indoor Dancewalks, consisting of two performances – Retroperspectives and Voyage. An initiation to the Outdoor Dancewalk, the Indoor Dancewalks let one apprehend with intimacy and the freedom of travelling through dance in body and spirit within enclosed spaces. On stage, surrounded by one vertical and one horizontal video projection, a lone female dancer, Alizée Sourbé, dialogued with the audio-visuals of 30 Outdoor Dancewalk performances (600 kilometers danced around the world by Foofwa d’Imobilité since 2015), incarnating the particular kinesthetic coordination of dancewalking. It ended on the terrace at Khoj Studios, where the dancers invited the audience to participate and embody the Dancewalk.

INDOOR-OUTDOOR

join the dance through workshops and classes, Foofwa declared through this dance in the public space that each one of us can reclaim one’s freedom and pride of being unique. Two Dancewalk workshops, that invited dancers and musicians to participate and collaborate, were also held at Khoj. The focus of the workshops were to understand the particularity of dancewalking. The workshops culminated with the participants and collaborators initiating the Outdoor Dancewalk. In the Khirkee edition, named Outdoor Dancewalk - Khirkee, the Dancewalk began at Khoj and meandered through Khirkee streets, ending at the Saket Select City mall, underlining the contrast between the two parts of the city on either side of the road. The event was supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

PERFORMANCE

BODY IN TRANSIT Surabhi Saraf 28 August 2018

Surabhi Saraf is a media artist and founder of the Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology through multimedia works that incorporate video installations, sculptures, and performances. Working with sound composition, poetry, and moving image, Saraf’s Body in Transit (featuring movement by Shinichi Iova-Koga and text by Dorothy Santos), explored the ways in which the human body travels through physical and imagined spaces. The work presented the anxiety and disorientation of displacement through transit and forced migration, the context being the political and cultural climate within the United States, as countless individuals grapple with the imposed immigration ban. ARTIST PRESENTATION

SOUND IMMERSIONS The two events at the courtyard of Khoj Studios are worthy of note; both the evenings pique Khoj’s interest in sound/noise/music-based live art.

DJ MMA Tseleng

MKM

27 September 2018

11 February 2019

DJ Mma Tseleng at Khoj

Rangoato Hlasane, aka DJ Mma Tseleng, played a set comprising his sonic research, concerning ‘songs as texts’, rerouting Kwaito’s roots in what he called an ‘expanded family tree’, in order to make visible the political and historical significance of the genre. His vocabulary of South African indigenous music(s) and its family trees (such as Marabi, Kwela, Malombo and Kwaito), span influences from the African continent, North America, and parts of Asia and Europe – such as jazz, soul, rock ‘n roll, funk and hip-hop. While sounds were laced in nostalgia on the September evening, MKM’s winter night heard their high frequency interference, analog synthesizer bridges, and percussion-based samples.

SOUND ART

Both events were supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

SOUND IMMERSIONS

MKM at Khoj

From harsh rhythmic noise to rich sonorities, Günter Müller (iPods, electronics), Jason Kahn (modular synthesizer) and Norbert Möslang (cracked everyday – electronics), formed the Swiss electronic music group MKM in 2006. They have performed in Japan, the US, Canada, Korea, Europe, Russia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Columbia. They have released seven CDs and have collaborated with many international musicians, including Mark Trayle, Damo Suzuki, Casey Anderson, Christian Weber, Joke Lanz, Aube, Keiichiri Shibuya, Maria, Gino Robair, Tom Djll and Matt Ingalls.

FOREST TALES Artist talk and motion picture performance by Anuj Vaidya 21 November 2019

A Sitayana in mycological times

Khoj invited Anuj Vaidya for an evening of talks and a unique motion picture performance. Vaidya is an educator, media/performance maker, and curator, whose work meanders around themes of queer ecology. His practice – what he calls, aforestation, is deeply invested in questions of process and collaboration, and resides in the sphere of multi-species thinking, a speculative Larval/Mycelial Futures. In his artist’s talk, during the first-half of the evening, he introduced his collaborative project, Larval Rock Stars, with artist/scholar Praba

ARTIST TALK / PERFORMANCE

Pilar, that sat at the intersection of the bio-techno-critical and the absurd, aiming to undo the category of the human. His work through the Radical Mycology Collective (with Stephaney Maroney and Mercedes Villalba) is invested in thinking with mushrooms and fungi, as material and as method, through gaming, collaborative storytelling, and pedagogy. The session moved on to the much-awaited motion picture performance, The Smoldering Forest, which is part of Vaidya’s speculative cinema project, Forest Tales, a queer sci-fi eco-feminist retelling of the Ramayana as a Sitayana. Originally imagined as a film, Forest Tales intended to use human-powered solutions for the production. However, since the most environmentally-friendly film is the one that never gets made, the project now exists as a performance of the film. In the iteration, performed at Khoj, audience members participated in an embodied ‘motion-picture’, co-creating a ‘speculative cinema’ in the process. This included a cinematic visualisation, where audience members were blindfolded and invited to imagine a scene from the film. The practice demanded that we not only radically reimagine our narratives about the past, present and future, but also reinvent the technologies that we use to tell them.

FOREST TALES

ECHOLOCATION Ifie Sin 24 October 2018

Marking the beginning of a partnership with the Korean Culture Centre, Echolocation was a culmination of Ifie Sin’s four-week residency at Khoj. Ifie Sin is a visual artist based in Seoul. Taking as a central motif, the Museum of Natural History in Delhi, which was destroyed in a fire in 2016, the work delved into senses of loss, and the loss of senses in the contemporary. The open-day event for the exhibition began with a talk by the artist-in-residence, and was introduced by curator Akansha Rastogi. This event was held in partnership with the Korean Culture Centre.

RESIDENCY

SENSIBLE PHENOMENA public talk by Cécile Beau 23 November 2018

Khoj hosted a talk by French artist Cécile Beau, where she spoke about her project at the Bhubaneswar Art Trail, followed by a conversation with Mila Samdub. Cécile Beau uses nature as her focal point, which she then turns into a subject of contemplation and research. She combines plants and minerals with illusionist machinery in her sound, light, minimal, and sensory installations. The result encapsulates physical phenomena in the shape of austere and enigmatic landscapes. By looking into phenomena that are either too slow or too discreet for the human time scale, she creates what could be labelled as “slow science fiction”. And it is this very discrepancy – this realistic universe enhanced with a layer of fiction – that infuses her work with all its poetry.

PUBLIC TALK

SAFE SPACES/UNSAFE TIMES: SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN A SUSPENDED WORLD 03 November 2018

Film screenings followed by artists’ talks and discussions Films: Daaravtha by Nishant Roy Bombarde, Nawa by Santa Khurai.

Image from Laurence Rasti’s photo series ‘There are no homosexuals in Iran’

discussants & presenters: Aryakrishnan, Nishant Roy Bombarde, Saptarshi Mandal, and Santa Khurai from India; Swiss photographer Laurence Rasti

FILM SCREENING / ARTIST TALK

Beyond the din of the mainstream narrative around the repeal of Section 377 and other NGO-initiated issues, the question of larger support systems for people with non-normative sexualities and genders is of crucial importance. A film like Daaravtha, which explores this at the intimate level of a mother and a son, and the photographic works of Laurence Rasti – who documents the lives of homosexuals from Iran in precarious and suspended life situations – opened up discussions about the broader social landscape and how it enables or discourages life’s varied expressions. As Saptarshi Mandal said of Laurence’s photos, “They speak a lot about family, support, loneliness, state and so on”. Santa Khurai’s film Nawa, of which we saw some snippets as it was still in the making, brought forth another such context of the nurturing a society can provide.

Still from Daaravtha (2015) by Nishant Roy Bombarde

This event was held in collaboration with Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

SAFE SPACES / UNSAFE TIMES

KHIRKEE STORIES Khoj has found a home in Khirkee since 2002 and is deeply invested in the neighbourhood its growth and the well-being of its residents. As an organisation that lies in the heart of this area, Khoj has consistently engaged with the local community through a variety of art-based projects. Khoj has used its unique embeddedness in Khirkee to initiate and sustain a variety of programs with the local community while also mediating the various tensions in this area.

KHIRKEE STORIES

SOLO DANCE COMPETITION 17 August 2019 A Solo Dance Competition, led by Ashif Khan, was programmed at Khoj Studios in association with the Delhi Breaking Culture. Assistant Production and Media Coordinator at Khoj, Ashif has been a dancer since the age of 14. Heavily influenced by B-boying – including Hong 10 (South Korean B-boy) and Lilou (Algerian-French B-boy) – he goes by the stage name “Bboy Shif”. Dancers of all ages and categories were invited to participate in the first edition of this contest. With Shubham Kapruwan, Meenu Shrivastav and Amir (Amy) Khan as judges, participants were given a minute and 30 seconds to perform in the style of their choice in a classic dance cypher arena set up, with cash prizes up for grabs!

SOLO DANCE

KHIRKEE STORIES

DRAWING SESSIONS For the past three years Khoj has opened up its space to young Afghani students from the Khirkee neighbourhood to come and explore various mediums of art practices. Weekly drawing sessions are conducted by in-house residents, Khoj staff, visiting artists and Khoj fellows. The students learn to sketch their ideas and use drawing as a way to express themselves.

FOOTBALL SESSIONS Khoj has also been funding football training and coaching sessions for children and young adults from the Khirkee community.

DRAWING SESSIONS / FOOTBALL SESSIONS

Khirkee Voice/Khirkee Awaaz, our bilingual, hyper-local zine has officially completed three years of existence. With the tenth edition now out, editors Malini Kochupillai and Mahavir Singh Bisht speak about how the project has transformed over the years, and how Khirkee Voice is creating a certain kind of hyperlocality by its very existence.

INTERVIEW

On that note, what is the framework of the content in the zine?

MB: Because Khirkee Voice is a collaborative process, we get a variety of contributions – all kinds of artists, including people from within Khirkee.

MK: With all these amenities in close proximity, Khirkee has everything that you might need in a city. And for me, hyperlocal is exactly that. The idea of the tabloid that becomes hyperlocal is to identify the hyperlocal as an important element, and by extension the people who occupy it. That’s what we try to do with Khirkee Voice in this microcosm – to frame concerns and questions in a way that becomes relatable and relevant to residents, showing people a way to think about things in a different way. The tabloid becomes a perfect medium for this. It is accessible, unintimidating. The involvement of the arts is also critical, since art has a way of presenting an idea that starts to be less accusatory. It starts to not point a finger. It has potential to provoke thought, more than a reaction. The form has allowed us to have collaborations with different artists who have their own reading and understanding of the city and its neighbourhoods. The fact that an institution might support this kind of an abstract idea has been phenomenal, and very encouraging.

MK: Our plan is to find a group of people within the community, with continuing institutional support like we are getting, to take the project forward – driving it from within the community, for the community. Through our workshops and on-ground interventions, we have been very fortunate to find some interesting people that we continue to engage and collaborate with. As we go about the neighbourhood distributing new editions, a lot of young people express an interest in participating in future workshops, driven by an eagerness to see themselves featured in print. So we’ll reach out to them when we have more workshops. It’s a long process. The idea is to take the time to patiently engage with the community and to show them the value of developing a collective re-imagination of the neighbourhood.

How has the community around Khirkee Voice developed? What is the future of this community?

or getting differential treatment based on class, literacy or language accessibility. And even if one doesn’t read, they might relate to the photographs, drawings, or artworks in every edition. I think both Mahavir and I enjoy this mentoring aspect of our roles as editors, it’s our job to help you present your ideas in a way that appeals to, and makes sense to a wide audience.

MK: So we always start with a broad framework for an issue; and it is always broad enough so that we can address it in many different ways, and allow for a fascinating variety of interpretations and expression, depending on the specific interests and practices of our contributors. The format of the zine has an equal opportunity of image and text. When these two are put together, the possibilities of communicating an idea becomes manifold. It appeals to a wider audience. We love working across disciplines – as academics, illustrators, cartoonists, photographers – all to find different ways to unpack this very complex idea of what it is like to live in a city. What I had also observed, leading up to Coriolis effect, was that Hindi language medium tabloids have a completely different set of news items and perspectives from what one sees in the English medium. I imagine in other regional languages also there’s the same divide. I was confounded by that, why is there this difference in what one consumes, based on what language one reads, speaks, or is comfortable with. So it was very important for us, from the get-go, to have exactly the same content in different languages so nobody feels like they are missing out,

Malini (MK): The diverse fabric of Khirkee truly describes to me a microcosm of the larger city; and in that, presents a perfect lens through which one can look at the city and unpack complex urban concerns. Issues that seem insurmountable in the larger city become more relatable and can start to be more easily addressed at the scale of a neighbourhood.

Mahavir (MB): What has worked for Khirkee Voice is its familiarity. Khirkee is very different from other communities, possibly because it is sandwiched between upper-class neighbourhoods and urban spaces. It is a “laal dora” area, and has a somewhat ambiguous legal status. Most of the people here live on rent. It attracts a lot of migrants because it provides affordable housing in the heart of the city. And it is located conveniently near a mall, hospitals, schools and colleges; there’s a market where you get everything.

MK: I think what is critical in these complex times we live in, is the need to engage in real conversation – open, honest, empathetic, and considerate dialogue. It made sense to us to start with the neighbourhood – a finite and relatable unit of the city. To presume that anybody has any power to dramatically change things is too ambitious – you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment. Nobody is capable of changing everybody’s minds, or changing everybody’s behaviour overnight. That’s not our interest. Our interest is to plant a seed of a new thought, or an idea in our readers’ minds – the personal engagement of the tabloid format is the perfect medium for that.

MB: I think five years is a good time to register and analyse the impact. There are constant conversations from people within the community. That will be a way to make it sustainable. We have already identified one or two people from within the community whom we think can be mentored and persuaded to take on the project in future. We are constantly on the lookout for more people who show an avid interest in Khirkee Voice and are keen to become a part of its journey.

re-imagination of the neighbourhood.

We extend a big thank you to our Board Members, Advisory Board, Benefactor, and the Capital Circle members for their ongoing support.

KHOJ TEAM Director Pooja Sood Programmes Team Radha Mahendru Manjiri Dube Alina Tiphagne Fellows Indranjan Banerjee Manvi Bajaj Media & Production Suresh Pandey Ashif Khan

KHOJ BOARD Amar Kanwar Anita Dube Czaee Shah Manisha Parekh Pooja Sood Savita Apte Urvashi Butalia

KHOJ ADVISORY BOARD Amrita Jhaveri Hoor Al-Qasimi Poonam Bhagat Shroff Shalini Passi Sunita Choraria

Accounts & Administration VP Manoj Saloni Anand Laxmi Devi

SPECIAL THANKS TO

Support Staff Arun Chettri Manohar Bhengra

Khoj building redesigned by Studio Lotus in 2012

Robert Loder

BENEFACTOR Sangita Jindal

CAPITAL CIRCLE Project Room supported by Amrita Jhaveri Courtyard supported by Shalini Passi Artist Residence supported by The Malhotra Weikfield Foundation (in memory of Kanwal Mohini Malhotra) Reading Room supported in memory of Manhar Bhagat by Poonam Bhagat Shroff, Nirlon Foundation Trust Terrace supported by Czaee Shah Media Lab supported by Sunita Choraria Studio #1 supported by The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Studio #2 supported by Geeta Kapur & Vivan Sundaram Studio #3 supported by S.H. Raza Studio #4 supported by Apeejay Trust in Memory of Surrendra Paul Studio #5 supported by Nature Morte

Thanks to Bhavna Kakar, Max & Monique Burger & Jayashree Mohta.

Khoj International Artists’ Association S-17, Khirkee Extension New Delhi 110017

www.khojworkshop.org For queries please contact:

interact@khojworkshop.org

Detail from Memorial to Lost Words by Bani Abidi

Book Design by Sijya Gupta