Khoj Peers 2024
The 2024 edition of Peers has been supported by The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation and Tarana Sawhney. The residency incubated a group of five artists, Bhavneet Kaur, Debashruti Aich, Dhiraj Rabha, Pratik Anil Sutar, and Swati Kumari, along with the critic, Adreeta Chakraborty.
Peers is an annual art residency programme run by Khoj. 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. Now in its 20th year, the residency has grown in terms of scope and outreach. 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.
This year the Peers calendar was organised to bring together diverse installation and object making art practices, drawing and design practices, language, writing, note-making, archives, diverse visual voices, ways of storytelling, and the Khirkee community.
The Peers cohort at the Satpulla Dam, Khirkee. Image by Swati Kumari.
The residency started off with a peer-to-peer sharing session where the cohort engaged in dialogue and shared about their practices through presentations and conversations. This was followed by a walk around the Khirkee neighbourhood, led by junior curator and programmes manager Gauri Pathak, along with community mobiliser and Khirkee resident Simran, and Afghani artist-entrepreneur Maryam Kakar. The purpose of the walk was to help the cohort situate themselves in the historical but also the contemporary and unique socio-cultural fabric of the village, allowing them to place themselves and contextualise their practices in the context of Khirkee and Khirkee Extension. Later in the month, the residents also attended the showcasing of Gumm aur Dr Khoj Ki Kahaani as part of the Khoj After School programme which is a community engagement programme for the children of Khirkee.
At Ravi Agarwal's studio. Image by Suhasini Pande.
The second week of the residency began with a visit to the studios of Ravi Agarwal and Asim Waqif who shared the purpose, methodologies, and insight behind their respective art practices. The interactions and learnings the cohort had here were then further enriched when they visited the Asia Art Archive India and attended a writing workshop with writer-programmes manager Annalisa Mansukhani at the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Arts (FICA) at their Reading Room during the same week. These visits opened processes of archiving and archives as well as writing (not limited to text or text-based forms) across artistic practice as a way of thinking about practice, process, and making.
During the third and fourth week the cohort spent a day with Rashmi Kaleka at Farm8, in Aya Nagar. As the Peers walked around the farm and learnt about its history and functioning, they got introduced to the concept of permaculture, as well as understood how a curatorial practice can link artists to the land. Conversations with Rashmi inspired the cohort to reflect on their impact on the planet, the beauty of blending tradition with innovation, and the need for porous frameworks.
Meeting Anshika Varma. Image by Shweta Mehta.
During the same week, the cohort visited Offset Projects and engaged in day-long conversation with founder-publisher Anshika Varma, who expanded on the ideas of visual media. The cohort also met with artist and Khoj board member Rohini Devasher at her studio in Noida, where the interaction dove deep into the history of observation and exploration of the natural world, and how an artistic practice can combine what we know, what we imagine, and what we hope.
Simultaneously, Khoj collaborated with the Serendipity Arts Foundation for an enriching, closed door, informal round table session for the residents of both the organisations to explore the context of residency programmes at both these organisations, unpacking the similarities, differences, and independent approaches. The discussion was followed by a session by lawyer Rushda Khan who engaged with the residents on how to navigate legal frameworks and contracts in the arts ecosystem.
Throughout the residency and leading up to the Open Studio Days, the cohort had enriching in-person conversations with curator-writer Anushka Rajendran, artists Achia Anzi and Gagan Singh, and artist-researcher Suvani Suri. These interactive sessions encouraged the cohort to contemplate aesthetics, politics, philosophy and temporalities of listening and artmaking, charting a course through the archive, and reading the thematic clusters and inclinations that emerge and develop.
Khoj also organised a writing workshop with programme manager-writer Annalisa Mansukhani and Khoj senior curator Indranjan Banerjee for the critic-in-residence Adreeta Chakraborty around the process of locating the self as the writer, how does the writer implant themselves in contexts and in what modality does the writerly voice get formed based on the writer’s likes/dislikes, tastes, mood, history, triggers and proclivities.
ARTISTS
The artists this year chose to work with themes of catharsis, resting, ecology, urbanisms, and social commentaries using found and uncommon materials, and mediums, while also pushing themselves to think out of the box and understand how to present their practices.
Bhavneet Kaur is an interdisciplinary artist-designer & writer-researcher. Her creative practice is rooted in non-imperial making while navigating social structures dictated by modernity/coloniality. She vividly explores the thematics of identity, ancestral memories, and embodied female knowledge. She studied at Design Academy, Eindhoven, Netherlands, and is from Phagwara, Punjab.
being with by Bhavneet Kaur during the Open Studio Days at Khoj. Image by Shweta Mehta.
For Peers, Bhavneet thought through her experiences in the Netherlands, of psychosomatic pain and extraction, and how wheat flour (atta) and the act of kneading dough to make roti became both cathartic and nourishing for her. To translate her lived experiences, Bhavneet’s inquiry was led by a search for a medium that could hold the weight of her story, leading her to aluminium. The multipurpose aluminium - which wraps rotis and which is used in pain-relief; has a very extractive and concerning mining process. Through her project, being with, Bhavneet thinks through materiality and medium mindfully and how they can represent inherent feelings and the body and its memory.
Culmination of Constraints or How Big is Big? or Untitled by Debashruti Aich during the Open Studio Days at Khoj. Image by Gauri Pathak.
Debashruti Aich is a visual art practitioner whose works are a pictorial autobiography of her understanding of the reality around her. Inspired by her deep unspoken feelings, her works revolve around family, values, and somehow try to break the fourth wall. She is from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand and lives in Hyderabad. She has done her Master’s in Visual Arts from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat.
During Peers, Debashruti defined her practice as a dance with process, one which houses the otherworldly and the extraordinary to evoke familiar socialites. Drawing from her personal experiences, her work is an assemblage of spaces which turn into places that open intricate, intimate, and often vulnerable worlds and narratives.
to the edge by Dhiraj Rabha during the Open Studio Days at Khoj. Image by Shweta Mehta.
Dhiraj Rabha’s body of work deals with the history of insurgency in Assam. Drawing on his memories and experiences, as well as the resources and archives which are gathered through research, he challenges dominant narratives and brings to light the stories of those who have been marginalised and silenced, offering a more nuanced and critical understanding of the complex social and political forces that shape our world.
During the residency, Dhiraj complicates his long-standing inquiry into the chequered history of Assam. His work, to the edge, places the viewer in the spotlight to look back at them in ways that can cause discomfort, evoke familiarity, or generate empathy. Mounted in a narrow corner of a seemingly empty room are archival photographs paired with a rebellious poem by the late Kabiranjan Saikia and whispers of songs. As one inches closer, small cutouts appear in the walls revealing video works and interviews within boxed enclosures. With his project, Dhiraj explores the vexed fulcrum of showing his work and site specificity, proposing that if the viewer wishes to see truly, then they must move from the centre to the edge.
Dhiraj has an MFA in Painting from Kala Bhawan in Santiniketan, West Bengal.
Pratik Sutar is a visual artist and sculptor from Kolhapur. His artistic practice is deeply rooted in his family's legacy of craftsmanship and is based on the memories and everyday experiences retained in one's subconsciousness and how they shape identities. In his sculptures, Pratik consistently engages with light and shade as modes of experience and perception.
kohra by Pratik Sutar during the Open Studio Days at Khoj. Image by Shweta Mehta.
At Khoj, he revisits the story of the six blind men who went to see an elephant and its retelling across languages and cultures. His sculptural installation, kohra, invites the viewer to think of what makes something whole and question ways of seeing and vocabularies of sight. Accompanied by a couplet in Marathi, Hindi, and English, Pratik’s work is a quest to find heart in the scatter, beyond the blur of everydayness.
Pratik has a Master’s in Fine Arts from JJ School of Art, Mumbai.
Swati Kumari, through her practice, aims to spark curiosity, prompting viewers to question their surroundings and how they relate to them. The attempt is to explore the dynamic relationship between the body, space, and the viewer using familiar forms and objects. She is from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh and has studied for her Master’s of Visual Arts at Ambedkar University, Delhi.
gasp slowly by Swati Kumari during the Open Studio Days at Khoj. Image by Gauri Pathak.
During Peers, Swati navigates through nuances of rest and pause, situating them in the context of the domestic as well as the social. Tracing personal and familial journeys across borders and in transit towards ‘the good life’ her project, gasp slowly, takes one to the intersection of acknowledgement and comfort. As tentacular cushions stitched with her grandmother’s old saris sprawl across the floor and clouds of colours burst on the wall, Swati’s installation invites one to be held. Books and drawings pop in a sea of cushions bearing witness to histories of these journeys. As one, quite literally, sinks to the floor, the cushiony tentacles acknowledge them.
Critic-in-Residence
Adreeta Chakraborty is intrigued by what might ensue, creatively, from documenting works-in-progress. Currently in her writing, creative and otherwise, she is exploring the shape and nature of home in the city, thinking through questions of belonging, ownership, and access in the unwieldy behemoth that is Delhi. She is interested in pushing conventions and exploring formal possibilities with respect to the act of recording/documenting, probing the ways in which an archive or a chronicle could also be a creative project and an experiment.
Adreeta Chakraborty’s intervention at the Khoj Canteen. Image by Shweta Mehta.
At Khoj, Adreeta thought through the context of an artist-residency for a critic. From locating oneself as writer to seeing how one’s records can almost be a kind of barometer of the evolving creative impulses at play around them, she keenly investigated the transformation of ‘process’, once a tormentor, into company.
Working on perception of time, slowness, and a search for a language as well as ruminating on the idea of company and for whom one makes art for, Adreeta authored two dispatches ‘Slow Churn’ and ‘Company’ for the Khoj website.
Adreeta has a Master’s in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
