Peers 2024 Critic's Essay

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Peers 2024

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Khoj Team Director Pooja Sood Head of Programs Manjiri Dube Curatorial and Programs Team Indranjan Banerjee, Gauri Pathak, Isha Bhattacharya Media & Production Suresh Pandey Admin & Accounts V.P Manoj, Govind Bhandari Canteen Rajesh Gupta, Karma, Phulmata Fellow Shweta Mehta Intern Suhasini Pande Support Staff Arun Chhetri, Pancham Kerketta

Fabrication and Production Shakhawat Khan, Jitender Singh Sharma Kishanveer Singh, Patel Brothers, Digital Work Studio Printed at Satyam Grafix

Publication Editors Indranjan Banerjee Isha Bhattacharya Publication Design Shweta Mehta

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Production, publishing, copyright: Khoj International Artists’ Association www.khojstudios.org No part of this publication maybe reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the mentioned publisher of this publication.

Peers 2024 was supported by Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation and Tarana Sawhney

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Every year, Khoj opens its doors to a group of recent college graduates and young artists, who come together for an on-site residency at Khoj, under the aegis of Peers.

Since its inception in 2003, the Peers Residency provides space for experimentation and exploration outside academic confines allowing emerging practitioners to interact with the larger creative community as well as attempt to create a network of diverse artists across mediums and disciplines. At its core, this residency acts as a stepping-stone for young artists, aiding them through a transitional moment in their artistic practice.

The programme offers them the transdisciplinary resources necessary to push the experimental limits of their work while providing a supportive learning environment.

Now in its 20th year, the residency has grown in terms of scope and outreach, with a wider and more diverse applicant pool and Khoj too has restructured the residency model from a fourweek residency to six-weeks, providing the residents with a longer-term engagement to develop their practice at large.

Peers 2024 brought together artists from Punjab, Telangana, Assam, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh to work at and with Khoj for 6 weeks leading towards the showcase for the Open Studio Days. The residency incubated a group of five artists: Bhavneet Kaur, Debashruti Aich, Dhiraj Rabha, Pratik Anil Sutar, and Swati Kumari, and the critic, Adreeta Chakraborty.

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Text by Adreeta Chakraborty IV

“Forgive me, everybody,” whispered the hunger artist; only the overseer, who had his ear to the bars, understood him.

“Of course,” said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let the attendants know what state the man was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.

“Well then we don’t admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist. “What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can’t you help it?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” 1 1

Franz Kafka, ‘A Hunger Artist’ , in The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, trans.

Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).

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In Franz Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’, the problem, as always, is a creature, fixing its gaze, writhing. An itinerant artist cages and puts himself on display for changing publics, fasting for up to forty days at a stretch. At the zenith of his success despite the fundamental solipsism of his ‘practice’, he is the talk of the town, a superstar performer drawing hundreds across ages. But engagement has its teeth and its claws: while children wonder at the artist’s strenuous feat, adults scrutinise and monitor his act, thinking he is some sort of charlatan.

Townspeople are sometimes assigned to fastidiously ensure he does not eat anything through the night or, in a move that is a deeper slight to the integrity of his vocation, they purposely turn away in order to give him an opportunity to steal a bite.

The public’s scepticism stalks the artist’s days as he continues to aspire towards selfdenial in toto, a ‘true’ art made only truer and more satisfying, more self-actualising for him not despite but because of the incredulity with which it is received and held in the world.

The limits imposed on his fasting by his impresario on account of the audience’s fading interest begin to irk him, not least because of the unpleasant way in which his performance is cut short, with the doctor intervening and his manager making a production out of demonstrating his frailty as the key selling point and indeed, the point, of his work, until he is force-fed by a gallery of spectators. The hunger artist grows

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melancholic but strives towards a pure, expansive, limitless fasting, a total self-abnegation but the impresario makes a neat buck out of showing photographs of the artist withering away as supposedly a result of his fasting when, in reality, the artist’s wretchedness stems from being denied the opportunity to fully realise it, to take his fasting to impossible frontiers beyond palatability, belief, interest, reason.

Eventually, this form of entertainment goes out of vogue and the hunger artist joins the circus where he becomes a sideshow on the way to the menagerie, a far cry from the pivotal attention, sceptical or wonder-struck, that he received in his heyday. A relic of the past now, he is a passing curiosity for the public, but ironically it is in this invisibility and insulation that he finally exceeds his fasting record, a feat that goes unrecorded and unnoticed. Before he dies, he abjures the admiration reserved for the martyr, saying only that he fasted because he could not find any food that he liked.

The story can be difficult and frustrating to read in the ‘paranoid’ way that Eve Sedgwick2 warns against: if we go hunting for resolutions by way of indicting ‘deception’, there isn’t much that Kafka can offer us. Is art determined by the public that encounters or consumes it? Is existing within the market antithetical to creative work? What does that mean for creative labour? Is creative work better realised in isolation or is this a renegotiation of the troubled bequest of Romantic ideals? Is it realised at all if noone’s there to see it, like the fallen tree in the forest that noone ever heard fall?

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See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123-151.

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The story throws up questions that are often at odds with each other; reading it a few weeks after the residency took me back to the pulse of Peers as a programme: a rapid stream where you attempt to locate or abandon your anchors. As Critic-in-Residence, it seemed worthwhile taking Sedgwick’s advice—tracing the flow, staying with the trouble.

• In an inexorably digitalised world, is it possible to communicate and connect with a wider public through one’s work without keeping pace with algorithms that dictate relevance, viewership, circulation and indeed regulate and curate a mass sensorium? At his Defence Colony studio in the second week of the residency, Ravi Agarwal told us, ‘Instagram pre-exposes your work.’ On the other hand, there is a whole industry around the fetishisation of slowness that ignores the exigencies of social inequalities in the art world or elsewhere. Who gets to make work slowly and who has to keep churning it out at a breakneck pace?

Technology has come to inform the shapes of work so consummately today that it’s hard to wrench any freedom for even creative labour, for all its exceptionalism, from those dictates and urgencies. All this to say, if you’re not making your art fast enough, will there be anyone around to see it or care?

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At the residency, seeing Bhavneet, Debashruti, Dhiraj, Pratik, and Swati navigate their creative processes with a considered, sometimes dithering, languor yielded hope that creative work may yet be free from the malign velocities of our time, a feeling that I tentatively dwelled on in my first dispatch.

It is evident that contemporary art lends itself to a fair bit of lampooning and parodising that may or may not stem from anti-intellectual trends governing our tastes and patterns of culture consumption today —this is an irresoluble anxiety that I found myself considering often while at the residency and one that Kafka’s story probed me to revisit. At Peers and at Khoj, I was keen to see how the makers of contemporary art then navigated those perceptions, how they situated their practices in a country and society and audience like India, in a neighbourbood like Khirkee, how they found ways to connect with the public through work that often elided what would traditionally be considered accessible modes of communication, how and if they chose their publics, whether or not they wanted to or felt the need to communicate, whether or not it haunted and fuelled their practices. Being the Critic gave me the unique opportunity of being their first audience, an audience they wouldn’t necessarily perceive as an audience but as a peer with AAA privileges who could pick their brains over a roast chicken and come away with more answers than you could otherwise hope to get from a bunch of young artists hunting for a voice.

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Design as experience Bhavneet Kaur

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One night in her studio, while I get comfortable on the mat with a chai, Bhavneet tells me she got tired of the brandclient spiel of commercial design work after a few years in the industry, and was beginning to ask herself: “What could I do with design if I had autonomy?” Disciplinary distinctions made between art and design strike her as reductive and unimaginative: for her, they are cousins, with art drawing from a rich symbology of the world that is shaped by design.

The audience is crucial in renegotiating and dismantling the unexciting binary mounted across the categories of art and design because it is the viewer whose imagination is deeply intertwined with the use of a designed object: “People will ultimately engage with design on their own terms, interpreting it as they see fit. Design is not total.” You’d use a mug as an ashtray and a chair as a foot-rest, and who’s to say what is and isn’t a fountain? Design and art may be productively brought together to allow us to deconstruct the essence of an object, the thingness of a thing, twice removed from reality as it is in the Platonic sense, and synthesise something entirely different.

Though for Bhavneet, the burden of communication lies more with design, she is keen to explore how design in and as art may convey meaning that can hold the extra-logic of aesthesis in the experiences that it constitutes.

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This preoccupation with overturning presupposed essences, coupled with a unique understanding of space and orientation, would go on to shape Bhavneet’s project for Peers as she thought through the ways in which the body records and remembers pain in environments that forcibly restrain its sensorially attuned ways of knowing and being from drawing upon a generative relationship with nature.

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Much of her process was led by a search for the medium — and an idiom — that could carry this story on its shoulders.

Arriving at aluminium enriched the modalities of her inquiry, its malleability as foil lending itself to the construction of knots in the body, its grainy texture as sand-casting evoking the materiality of atta.

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As the audience stepped into her studio on Open Day, with its floor wrapped in foil and showcasing a series of sculptures, under a focussed spotlight, resembling parts of the body registering chronic pain, they were encouraged to think through the possibilities of this medium and to break or renegotiate the meaning-making possibilities of an object, a space, and an experience, to yield something new.

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By way of poetry Pratik Sutar

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Pratik’s sculptures have often been a way for him to bring the community together in his native village. Referring to the large-scale sculpture of a blower that he had installed at a government school, he tells me the prospect of getting people and passersby to gather out of curiosity, interest, and the desire to have a conversation in public spaces is crucial to his practice that seeks to nurture and honour cultures of collectivity. The aim is to provide an ‘experience’ he says, that resonates across different demographics, while ensuring every participant grasps the theme in a way that feels authentic, in a language or idiom that they can call their own.

What are these authentic ways when it comes to poetry ?

Poetry draws and enamours some, befuddles and bewilders some, and drives away others simply because of its impenetrability. But even as Pratik seeks to reach a wide public with his work, he is unwilling to oversimplify that which is complex, in a gesture of faith in the publics he encounters wherever he goes.

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The fear of not being understood does not deter him from mounting his work on the register of the poetic, a commitment that speaks to consistently developing stylistic interests and the emergence of a voice in his oeuvre At Khoj, his sculptural installation, comprising a mediumsized elephant and a large wooden frame standing in for light streaming in from the door but blocked by a sea of pamphlets, both built painstakingly and slowly over weeks, was is an invitation to think through the forces that illuminate or obfuscate our social and political realities, figuring as interlocked elements in his project—a nod to the bequest writ large in his practice and a technique through which he communicates the personal and carries his family’s knowledge of wood craft forward in his work. The work, leaning on abstraction, probed the audience to interrogate the sum and parts of the monolith.

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He tells me: ‘Each artwork has its public, and I know the importance of catering to the crowd while allowing complex ideas to exist, even if not everyone can grasp them. Simplicity isn’t always beneficial; sometimes, it’s crucial that certain concepts remain elusive.’

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‘My work is done, now make this yours’ Debashruti Aich

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In exploring the relationship between space, place, and narrative, Debashruti treated her project like a fairy tale unfolding over multiple walls in the studio, making its elements its own. Thinking compositionally, she is inclined towards taking bodies out of their rectangular frames, defamiliarising them while maximising scale in ways that stand to evoke the uncanny, the fantastical, even the vaguely Gothic. This shift transforms how we experience the space, with columns, partitions, and planes shedding their role as anchors and coordinates and becoming key parts of the narrative, contributing to the undulations of its tone and atmosphere.

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A sense of placelessness, like in a Foucauldian heterotopia, comes to inform one’s experience of Debashruti’s work.

Overhead planes, vertical walls, natural light, and openings like doors are reconfigured, creating a complex compositional logic that subsumes all anchors of reality within ‘a total work of art’.

There can be no spillage; all is narrative.

When asked about the abundant presence of bodies in her work, she says they create ‘company’ in moments of isolation. Her unique stylistic idioms carry the otherworldly and the extra-ordinary to evoke familiar socialities. Drawing from the urgency of daily personal experiences, her visual language rests on an alphabet of magic: to access her work is to engage with this intricate worldbuilding, spending time with playful signifiers that speak to a certain protectiveness even as they lay out the unwieldy secret of vulnerability.

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At Khoj, she invited the audience to step into this world.

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You are in the spotlight Dhiraj Rabha

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The audience determines the installation more often than not for Dhiraj, whose work at Peers was an iteration of a long-term and ongoing project unearthing the narratives of those who have resided in the detention camps designated for ex-ULFA members. Like the poetry of Robin Ngangom or Cecilia Vicuna, his work refuses annotation and rejects footnotes that seek to make the local tongue and its contexts consumable to the diffuse reader, striving instead towards a language of fragments and an idiom that speaks more wholly, imaginatively, and corporeally to its own people.

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In Delhi, he gave us the corner of a corner, placing the audience under an interrogatory spotlight when they entered the studio and challenging them to peer into the darkness, in search of histories that the State has systematically marginalised from public memory. This dimly lit concavity would push the audience to make an effort to see, prompting questions around how one might ‘enter’ (and indeed with what right) a room or a story, especially one as vulnerable as this. This acknowledgment of complicity places the onus on viewers, inviting them to consider their role in the precipitation of these fraught histories.

Here we have a project that necessarily alters shape on the basis of site. When displaying the work at the detention camp, for instance, Dhiraj chose to eschew drawing altogether — ‘udhar mujhe abstraction nahi laana tha, mera intervention nahi laana tha’. In this particuar installation, the artist became a ‘watchtower’, engaging with the audience from a perspective that prioritised sharing over mere transmission of information. But that position changes in a Goa or a Delhi.

How much to show, how much to withhold, how much to intervene— the project’s drivers are deeply embedded in an interrogation of the artist’s power and responsibility in sharing, ‘curating’, ‘installing’, ‘displaying’ a story about insurgency with, for, and to a society in thrall to the magic of the nation-state.

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Dhiraj’s practice, like Pratik’s, takes an interest in cultures of collectivity and local idioms, and this is a preoccupation that comes to inform his method and his collaborations as a filmmaker. Conceptuality often takes precedence over materiality, with him developing ideas before selecting mediums, leading to the fostering of a collective practice where the sharing of knowledge becomes integral in order for the work to be realised and for the story to be told.

The distinction between showing and explaining becomes pivotal in his practice; revealing human stories rather than simply presenting journalistic accounts fosters a deeper connection, even as he resists diegesis to avoid disenfranchising in any way the families and communities living, enduring, and memorialising these histories.

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‘I am the medium’ Swati Kumari

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For Swati, installation, assemblage, and collage serve as means to navigate the desire to tell a story, each form inviting a distinct interaction with the viewer. The question of tactility emerges for her often: ‘When touch enters the equation, it prompts reflection on whether I want viewers to physically engage with my work or merely to observe from a distance.’ But at the residency, she took care to interrogate the modalities, consequences, memories, and paths of touch, eschewing the way in which the word is brandished to drive engagement in the art world.

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Large, tentacular forms invited the audience to sit amidst them on the floor of her studio, below a series of blind drawings on carbon paper that I saw her enjoy making the most and alongside a few handmade books.

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Through the residency, she was often beleaguered by the echoing museumspeak and galleryspeak of Delhi and the audience weighed heavy on her mind, but what struck me as most fascinating was the specific role carbon paper assumed in letting her navigate through that commotion: ‘viewer blur hogaya, focus sharp hogaya’.

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She imagined herself as the medium in telling an intergenerational tale: the blind drawings on its surface already receding into the past, the movement of peeling figuring processually as an unstable and shifting present and yielding the emergent image on the wall as a to-come, as arrival and as future.

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• At Peers, I wondered if meaning is a viscosity that may only congeal at its own languorous pace around signifiers, around the wispy mould of a mesh body or blind etchings on carbon paper yielding shapes you’d only known by instinct. In my first dispatch from the residency, it was this slowness that I wanted to consider, even as the days were dissolving into weeks, each day an estuary opening its mouth into endless water. Is there a place for slowness in the age we have inherited, and is there a place for waiting? Will your audience be inclined to wait while you meander your way through your practice, your self-expression, your language in this world?

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As I observed the five artists work slowly, sporadically, speedily, neurotically, consistently, diligently, or erratically, I wondered whether the audience was always an afterthought.

Or a fantasy, as Shuddhabrata Sengupta of RAQS Media Collective conjectured, like Dulcinea del Toboso of Don Quixote? In my second dispatch, I wondered whether the work one makes ever finds a home that does not feel alien, whether any home is only ever in the making. Either way it’s a gamble, and you’re in too deep to turn back: “He might fast as much as he could, and he did so; but nothing could save him now, people passed him by. Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting! Anyone who has no feeling for it cannot be made to understand it.” 3 3

Franz Kafka, ‘A Hunger Artist’, in The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).

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Khoj is a not-for-profit contemporary arts organisation based in New Delhi. Through our programs we support and incubate emerging, experimental and transdisciplinary creative practices and pedagogies. Since our inception in 1997, we have been committed towards building global networks and solidarities, especially in the subcontinent.

We believe that art is of intrinsic value to society; it is a crucial form of inquiry that provides unique insights and drives change through affect. +91 72898 81668

www.khojstudios.org

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