Khoj Peers 2023 — Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Blog

The 2023 edition of Peers has been supported by The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. The residency incubated a group of five artists, Celin Jacob V, Fileona Endoxa Dkhar, Gopa Roy, Mothe Mahesh, Shiv Shankar, and the critic, Riya Talitha Samuel.

Peers is an annual art residency programme run by Khoj, a not-for-profit contemporary arts organization based in Khirkee Extension, New Delhi. The programme 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. Over the years the residency model has been constantly refined and updated to be more relevant to the times. The programme is populated with artists’ visits and interactions, studio visits, workshops, and curated exhibition walkthroughs, for the residents to have a gamut of art-related experiences and exposure. These interactions are planned according to the needs and interests of the cohort to give them a stimulating experience and insights that would help them push their practice.

This year the Peers calendar was organised to bring together diverse socially engaged art practices, technology and design practices, language, writing, note-making, diverse visual voices, ways of story-telling, and the Khirkee community.

The residency started off with a peer to peer sharing session where the cohort dialogued with each other and shared about their practices through presentations and conversations. This was followed by a visit to Old Delhi with Khoj Team. This visit was programmed to familiarise the cohort with not just Delhi, a place some of them were visiting for the first time, but also the markets especially Chawri Bazar from where they could buy supplies and tools. During the week the cohort also attended an evening of listening rooms hosted at Khoj curated by REProduce Artists supporting a diverse roster of sonic (sound and noise) practitioners, produced by Rana Ghose.

Artist interactions with the residents included visits to the studios of Raqs Media Collective and Amar Kanwar who shared the purpose, methodologies, and insight behind their respective art practices. These visits opened up conversations for the cohort about how to undertake artistic research, transmediation, and involvement in the community in an engaging, accountable, and meaningful way. The interactions and learnings the cohort had while engaging with Raq’s and Amar’s practices were then further enriched when they had an online zoom session with Pors and Rao. With Pors and Rao, they delved into their practice over the years, its inherent conceptuality and interactivity, and a brief history of their work. The Peers asked many questions about how to work in collaboration and how to find ways to support experimental art practices.

Mahavir Singh Bisht, one of the artists behind Khoj’s periodical Khirkee Voice conducted a walk of the Khirkee neighbourhood. The walk became a point of interaction between the peers and the unique socio-cultural fabric of the village, allowing them to place themselves and contextualise their practices.

“Ways of Looking at Practice and Other Encounters”, a workshop by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Arts (FICA)

The Foundation of Indian Contemporary Arts (FICA) hosted a workshop at their Reading Room called “Ways of Looking at Practice and Other Encounters”. The session opened up writing (not limited to text or text-based forms) across artistic practice as a way of thinking about practice, process and making. Beginning with how forms of writing can be imagined, created, and employed in artistic practice, the session ended with participant-led reflections on how we read the elements that make up our own practices.

The cohort attended a day-long book binding workshop led by Anshika Varma, Founder, Offset Projects at Khoj. The workshop further expanded the ideas of visual media and of what can be a book, providing a holistic approach to book making and authorship of work. During the workshop Anshika touched upon the materiality of books, how ideas can become books, and breaking down the elements of a book and what role they play. The cohort was encouraged to bring images, drawings or material that they would like to build into a book and learnt three different binding techniques and their histories.

The two workshops helped the Peers understand and reflect on archive making and documentation of artistic processes and accessibility; thinking through histories of materials and mediums with an interdisciplinary lens.

Leading up to the open day, the cohort had an interactive session with artist and researcher Suvani Suri contemplating aesthetics, politics, philosophy and temporalities of listening and sound-making, charting a course through the archive, and reading the thematic clusters and inclinations that emerge and develop.

Simultaneously, Khoj also programmed an artist-led workshop by the Peers for children and young adults associated with Swechha, a Khirkee based NGO. During the workshop, the artist cohort interacted with the children giving them insight into their practices and teaching them about shape study, cyanotypes, and paper making.

The residency culminated in an Open Day at Khoj in Khirkee Village.

Artists

Celin Jacob V is a mixed media artist working with terracotta, clay, glass, and metal. Her works talk about those unspoken for (mostly insects and other small creatures) in conversations around ecology and contemplate multitudes of our ecosystem.
Celin is from Kerala. She has completed her BFA in Sculpture at R.L.V. College of Fine Arts, Tripunithura and is currently pursuing MFA in Sculpture at Government College of Fine Arts Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram.

*NonNative Lament: Vilayati Kikar by Fileona Endoxa Dkhar*

Fileona Endoxa Dkhar is a Khasi visual artist. Her research practice entwines mythology, ecology and fiction. Her artistic labour is textual and visual in its scope, usually challenging notions of direct translation or representation. This practice-based-research iterates itself through artist talks, performances, videos or audio-visual installations which often provide a layered inquiry into identity and landscape.
Fileona is based between Shillong, India and Rotterdam, Netherlands. She has Masters of Arts cum laude (Lens Based Media) from the Piet Zwart Institute, Netherlands.

*re-connecting the land of Khirki by Gopa Roy*

Gopa Roy’s artistic practice revolves around the intersections of landscape, land, farming culture, climate change, ecology, and the environment and how they shape human existence.
Gopa has a M.F.A. in Painting from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal.

Mothe Mahesh is a kinetic sculptor from Telangana. His practice is about how trauma shapes an individual rupturing their reality and perception. His works attempt to sculpt their present and have a strong affect.
Mahesh is currently pursuing his M.F.A from Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication.

असल तवीर से भी झटू क रचना हो सकती है ***by Shiv Shankar***

Shiv Shankar’s works have an interesting way of thinking through the community and experimenting with materials and mediums to build on tangibility and texture. For Peers, he draws from personal and socio-political nostalgia, and transmits his first-hand recollections onto second-hand screens. He talks about his own memories and the ways and times news channels used and manipulated real images into fake stories.
Shiv is from Bihar and has a B.V.A Major in Painting and Minor in Graphics from M S University, Baroda.

Critic-in-Residence

Riya Talitha Samuel (critic-in-residence) is a transmasculine cultural worker from a Dalit Christian heritage based in Delhi. Their work intentionally reflects their internationalist political beliefs, while their faith derives from radical queer traditions and anti-oppressive subjectivities.
They have a Bachelor of Arts, Political Science from The University of British Columbia, Vancouver and focus on political theory, particularly decolonial, indigenous & queer theory, to Black feminist thought. This bleeds into their current artistic practice and makes up the value system they use to orient themself. Their artistic practice is also inspired by principles of solutions journalism, as they have been a reporter for over five years writing about student activism, community mobilisation by minorities, independent creative industries and digital surveillance, and journalism.

This blog post was written by Khoj International Artists' Association.

Cover Image: The Khoj Peers cohort of 2023