It began as an experiment in an abandoned factory ground at Modi Mills in New Delhi. Twenty years later, KHOJ, International Artists’ Association has become synonymous with Indian arts; its members having worked with perishable materials, temporary structures, erasable signs and the artist’s own body. While to sum up this large range of artistic work produced over two decades is difficult, one can only attempt to understand the vast ground it has covered.
The organisation brought out a large book on its 10th anniversary that acts as a guide. Founder-member and curator Pooja Sood stands proud and tall to tell the tale of the organisation, along with other artist members—Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Anita Dube, Manisha Parekh, Ajay Desai and Prithpal Ladi. The collective was founded with the help of Robert Loder, founder of the U.K.-based Triangle Arts Trust.
A small newspaper clipping of the time when the founding artists came together for the first workshop in 1997 still exists and is part of the KHOJ memorabilia. The image is redolent with nostalgia and one tries to pick out the ant-sized figures of a just-out-of-art-school Subodh Gupta and an almost unrecognisable Anita Dube, clad in a pink kurta and with long black hair.
Anyone who has met Dube recently will notice the change of ideology and dress in short salt and pepper hair, kurtis and jeans. Parekh has remained her stately self though Gupta and Kher look quite different from this old newspaper clipping.
“KHOJ for me represents my entire journey and career as an artist in a capsule. We started meeting when KHOJ was not even born and it gives me great pleasure to be a part of its history as one of its trustees,” says renowned installation artist Subodh Gupta. KHOJ appeared on the arts scene when the contemporary art world looked very ‘gloomy’, says Gupta. Apart from the art galleries, there was nothing exciting happening at that time and art production only tread the beaten path.
Space for experiments
It was a time before the existence of plush galleries and a seemingly networked art world, when artists and gallerists raced between Basel and Shanghai, and international curators, once a rarity, were ubiquitously present in the Indian subcontinent.
KHOJ provided a space for artists to experiment and create work that was free of the gallery system and free of sales. One will never forget Gupta’s iconic performance piece that came out of a KHOJ artist’s residency in Modi Mills. Pure , was a video recording of his performance piece, where the artist bathed with cow dung as a symbol of identity, looking at various issues of class, caste and even gender through the transformative cow dung bath.
What started off as an event then became the alternative space for art, KHOJ has mapped many a milestone on its way. “I think having its own physical space here in Khirki is paramount,” says Pooja Sood. The whitewash over bricks building in Khirki village is hard-won, because for many years KHOJ was operating out of various experimental spaces. Sood’s office was (and arguably still is) her laptop, and artists came together to create artwork in spaces like demolished buildings. Now the café, the archive centre, and what is often used as a gallery space, offers KHOJ a physical presence on the map. Opposite the glitzy Select City Walk mall in Saket, it is an interesting contrast to the blatant consumerism encountered at the mall.
Artists’ network
The second most important factor, according to Sood, is the supportive network of artists. “I have been supported by artists since they have always thought of KHOJ as their space,” says the founder, who must have seen over a thousand artists come and go during the time that KHOJ has been operational.
The third milestone would be the contemporary issues that KHOJ workshops and seminars have engaged with. “We are perhaps the only arts organisation that has dealt with issues of ecology over a period of ten years. We were the first-ever organisation to host a performance art festival. We have especially spent time working with local communities and have been examining methodology and ways of looking at art, re-thinking ways of knowledge production,” says Sood.
From reinventing spaces to creating channels of reciprocity with Southeast Asia, mainland China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia and Japan, KHOJ became, as critic Geeta Kapur puts it: “part laboratory, part academy and part community centre…KHOJ is something that is by and for artists; where art is an act, a gift…not just a commodity to be bartered up at galleries and auction houses.”
Anita Dube wrote the first manifesto of KHOJ back in 1997. She was part of the Kerala Radical group, a short-lived artist-driven collective fuelled by leftwing political activism in the late 1980s. “The Radical collapsed because of its own contradictions. It is not possible to have a revolutionary ideology without some ground-level affiliation to a political outfit. KHOJ happened because we wanted a much more open space for art and other discursive intellectual activities — if it’s not available you have to set it up,” comments the next curator of the Kochi Biennale.
For an artist like Bharti Kher, KHOJ was a ‘catalyst’ for artists living and working in Delhi at that particular time. Kher was then seen as a Diaspora artist, a so-called outsider, an Indian born in the UK, and her bringing new readings to the everyday objects of our lives, was seen as highly critical and conscious. “I sometimes feel the bindis in my work are scars or markings. You can also see them as skin: a covering for your body that marks time; the witness to the marks of aggression on your body the accidents,” says Kher.
Parekh, an abstractionist recalls what KHOJ has meant for her: “KHOJ has always been about people performing within the paradigms of an alternative practice. Even though I do not directly work with performance or sound, being part of KHOJ provides triggers and stimulations that are refreshing and different,” says Parekh, who was part of the art and fashion residency.
KHOJ has also worked on a number of collaborations aimed at integrating the collective into their surroundings. These range from the Nukkad Natak group, comprised of children who have grown up around Khirki village, to the hip-hop Delhi graffiti group that has tapped into the trend of open studios and art on the street. The future lies in going digital and KHOJ’s next project is to develop and make accessible all their material as part of an international online archive.
The writer is a critic-curator by day, and a creative writer and visual artist by night. When in the mood, she likes to serenade life with a guitar and a plate of Khao Suey.
