Peers 2018 by Khoj International Artists' Association

Production, publishing and copyright Khoj International Artists’ Association www.khojworkshop.org Peers 2018 Artists-in-residence Damayanti Debnath (S.N. School of Arts and Communications, Hyderabad) Dharmendra Prasad (Govt. College of Arts and Crafts, Guwahati) Manjot Kaur (Government College of Art, Panjab University, Chandigarh) Shreya Shukla (M.S. University of Baroda, Vadodara) Throngkiuba Yimchungru (Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan) Virendra Maurya (S.N. School of Arts and Communications, Hyderabad) Critic-in-residence Sukaina Husain (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Khoj Program Coordinators Mario D’Souza and Radha Mahendru Publication Editor Lekha Jandhyala Design Furqan Jawed Photography Suresh Pandey Printed at Naveen Printers No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above mentioned publisher of this publication. Khoj International Artists’ Association receives support from The Norwegian Embassy. Peers is supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PEERS RESIDENCY PROGRAM Every year, Khoj opens its doors to a group of recent college graduates and young artists, who come together for a month long residency, under the aegis of ‘Peers’. At its core, the Peers program acts as a stepping-stone for young artists, aiding them through a transitional moment in their lives. The program not only offers them the physical space and resources necessary to push the experimental limits of their work, but also provides a supportive learning environment and an introduction into the larger network of the arts. The selection of final candidates is an arduous process, in which the jury works carefully to select a group of just 6 artists from an initial pool of more than 370 applicants. The final participants are chosen to represent a myriad of varied practices and artistic backgrounds, and also to give opportunity to those not traditionally trained in the arts. The idea is to not only choose artists’ whose body of work has reached a certain level of refinement or maturity, but also to select those who have the most potential to grow from the Peers program. Khoj International Artists’ Association initiated ‘Peers’ in 2003. The 2018 edition of Peers has been supported by The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. Peers Share 2018 was supported by Tarana and Tarun Sawhney.

A CRITIC’S DOUBT

Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear, And one to me are shame and fame.

Turn Thy Back On Heaven Why do anything? Why do anything at all? At the brink of the battle of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata, the Pandava warrior-prince, Arjuna watches the wheel of time take shape and move with relentlessness before his very eyes – decisions to maim, to kill and to wound are to be made; its cost is the ultimate carnage of life. Overcome by the possibility of the demise of the Kaurava men he loved, Arjuna is left bereft, and tries to turn break himself away from the possibility of pain. Despondency takes over him; the injustice of a life lived only through the choices one makes is revealed itself to him – as he watches in despair, the bridge between what is true and what is false collapses and Arjuna, the once immovable warrior, finds himself immobile and incapable of action. Why do anything? Why do anything at all? When we are faced with the ethical and moral consequences of our actions, we much like Arjuna, are left pining in vain for hope for an intervention that will absolve us of the moral and ethical responsibilities borne of our work and of our actions. Yet the path to reanimation of a body broken by existential ennui lies not, as Krishna advises the woebegotten Arjuna, in the path of inaction, but in action – in an eternal return to process, not progress. The ultimate aim of action does not lie in the hope that our deeds or our work will raise us up in an ascent to the pinnacle of whatever we deem to be the heavens, but in our turning back to those very heavens, in simply doing without want of desirable consequence. The following lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1856 poem, Brahma, come to mind: “If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain thinks he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,

They reckon ill who leave me out, When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

Nevermore! “Why do anything? Why do anything at all?” is often the battle-cry of the critic, that testy vanguard of culture. In more precise imprecise terms, the critic, like Poe’s raven, 1

taps persistently at the artist’s door, squawking, “why do this? Why do this this way?” (Figure 1). While certain varieties of this ‘ungainly fowl’ speak their discourse plainly, others obfuscate with little relevancy; in the bevvy of the field of cultural production, the critic emerges less like the messiah who expunges the artist out of despair, and more like a haunting ghoulish vision lifted off off Night’s Plutonian shore who traps the artist into despondent inaction. At the seat of higher-order thought, the critic is at once the exchequer of the hand and the tongue, a shadow that splices the soul into a darkness that shall be lifted... Nevermore! Have I taken it too far? Perhaps. Curse me if you will, but despite the dramatic overtures bludgeoning my analysis of the relationship between an artist and a critic, my above observations nonetheless bear the umbra of truth (Figure 2). More often than not, the charge of the critic lies in their ability to fully 2

examine and investigate the qualitative and functional value of an object. A critic’s studying gaze overturns the object of vision, laying its faults and virtues laid bare for all eyes to see. However, the process of criticism cannot be simply put; matters are, as they always are, far more complex than they seem at first glance. Before we begin our exposition into the ethical quandaries contemporary criticism finds itself in, it is necessary that we go offtrack and set the scene by taking a brief excursus into the history of criticism and its role in the formation of the philosophy of art as it stands today in contemporary art writing and criticism.

To contemplate is to see With the birth of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s eighteenthcentury aesthete, critical enquiry into the aesthetic quality and nature of perceptual objects was split into two distinct modes of criticality which I will now call, following Tzvetan Todorov, the heteronomous and autonomous modes of criticality.1 As M.H. Abrams has pointed out in his essay, ‘Kant and the Theology of Art’, the nature of criticality, particularly with regard to the contemplation of the aesthetic object, was transmuted from the ability to not only perceive and expound upon the qualities of an object in the ‘mind’s eye’, but to also construct and accord sufficient aesthetic value unto the perceived object through the very act of the perception of that object. The model of contemplation after Shaftesbury asserted “disinterested” apprehension as the morally correct ethical position in the judgement of beautiful objects. Judged for its own sake, the object of beauty was only held to be beautiful, and thus, worthy of appreciation insofar as it could be paradigmatically judged as autonomous and complete, that is, an end unto itself. Finding its roots in the theological language of the St. Augustine’s heteronomous mode of contemplation, Shaftesbury’s contemplation model followed a similar version of perception and vision wherein the “enjoyment of contemplation [fructum contemplationis]” was seen as

the “reward itself”.2 However, unlike in the construction model, the art work heteronomous, that is, not an end unto itself but instead a fruitio Dei that beheld a visio Dei.3 To see and delight in “[God’s] goodness and beauty” was fundamental to the act of contemplation -- to behold the beautiful was to envision God made particular within the world of sensible things ‘no longer... “through a glass darkly,” but “face to face”.4

The judge, the jury and the executioner

Categorically separate from the moral pursuit of the “original”, divine source of that very beauty and goodness typical of the Augustinian contemplation model, the ultimate purpose of the love of the beautiful in the Shaftesbury’s model was confined to the beautiful object itself. Following the burgeoning pressures of democratization and secularisation in eighteenthcentury European political and philosophical thought, the ‘ethical-religious’ language of “disinterestedness” was increasingly secularised within a model of contemplation typified and codified within Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711). Categorised as an end-unto-itself, the beautiful object now beheld beauty itself -- devoid of moral value, demonstrated the historical possibility of the absolute automomy of human agency itself. Following Shaftesbury, Immanuel Kant -- that Enlightenment figure much maligned in now outdated postcolonial thought -asserts that a perceptual object, in order to qualify as that which satisfies true, that is, “disinterested” aesthetic experience, must necessarily be autotelic (meaning that it finds its purpose in itself) in nature – in order to be seen as an object of beauty, the object must ‘not be subjected to any requirement from the true or the good’; it must be self-sufficient.5 Unlike the heteronomous mode of criticality, wherein the beholder critically looks and thus adduces the various qualities of the object in contemplation, the secularised autonomous mode of criticality requires the critic to be the judge, the jury and the executioner --- it is the critic who in clarifies whether

or not an object satisfies the conditions of true aesthetic experience; in doing so, the critic not only judges, but constructs the value, and more significantly, decides whether the object can sufficiently be accorded its status of a work of art.

Who cares? Who cares, though? Artists make art, poets and writers write, musicians make music regardless of whether some sophisticated, pseudo-intellectual litterateur thinks that their work is a ‘work of art’. Fair point. It is true that theory never successfully qualifies or quantifies the lived experience of making art. Intellectual effort fails in the face of naked life in the moment life is; to obscure the reality of life’s inherent metaphysical pathos and tension in one’s work is to engage in artifice and deception. However, the role of the critic, in the light of the darkness of bare reality, lies not in the simple construction of the value of the object-in-itself, but instead, in the ability to facilitate doubt through the act of looking. To look, and see that which is particular within a work is to begin to utter that which is as it is. If criticality is to simply look, then the work is completed with the gaze of the looker, it is never complete, never in and of itself; it must not speak, it must simply be there, saying enough but not saying fully. As the novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch states in her novel, Under the Net: “If by expressing a theory you mean that someone else could make a theory about what you do, of course that is true and uninteresting. What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement toward truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.”

To clarify, this ‘looking’ is not disinterested; on the

contrary, it is a turn towards the discovery of the world within which the object is circumscribed and becomes as it is. To look is to ascertain the world wherein the work comes to be; to be critical is to observe and qualify the facets of the historical world the art work gives means to through the techne of artistic production. Even in a faithless world, ‘the creator is no more allowed to discriminate than he is to turn away from anything that exists’; to turn and look, in our secular time, is perhaps (not only) to behold the Visio Dei but to instead see the world towards which artistic creation is directed and in its particular materiality, is inescapably a part of. (Figure 3).6 In according value a particular within their world through the very act of material production, the artist calls absolutely unmixed attention to ‘the distance between what we are and what we love’ -- what it is the world articulated materially is, and the distance between what it is that essentially makes that world that world.7 The discovery of that distance between the world that

is and one’s intersubjective position within that world is a process borne of the doubt facilitated by the mode of criticality. The discovery, that there is at once, something outside of oneself, and at once, part of oneself is the real experience facilitated by looking; Murdoch calls it ‘love’, and in so doing, emphatically states that ‘Love, and so, art and morals, is the discovery of reality’.8 The question for the artist, emboldened by the critical turn towards doubt, then becomes one of purposefulness – why is it that I am? Why is it that I am this way? How is it that I made present this way? Why is that I make this present this way? When as critics, we look, follow and ask of the artist and the work, ‘Why do this? ‘Why do this this way at all?’, we see an object that cannot and is not limited to itself. In the shadow of doubt, we see a world at once distant from, and part of ourselves; the discomfort of leaving our egocentric reality sets in, and we are once again, asked to look deeply, incisively, inside of our fragile selves (Figure 4).

‘Under the net’

Doubt is, nonetheless, a double-edged sword that maims and saves with the same hilt. The movement towards the

discovery of the reality of existence is to make oneself vulnerable to the consequences of the questions that arise from that very movement. Like Arjuna, when we look at reality on the frontlines of existence, terror sets in. We may either break at the hands of despondency and ennui or persevere unbridled with the want of consequence. In the abyss of reality, the insight that doubt creates brings a certain aspect of the distance between the articulation of the world and that which makes the world the world forth. The doubt facilitated by looking reveals the character and nature of a reality that inescapably binds and separates us to and from one another. However, insight is only possible insofar as the critical character of doubt is held in equal standing between the persons of the artist and the critic. When we state that the particular face of this discovery, and the doubt that facilitates it looks and is a certain way both formally and conceptually, and that that way by virtue of the superiority of one position over the other is the only morally and ethically correct way to engage in the pursuit of the discovery of reality, we upturn the moral character of criticality into that of hypocrisy. Criticality then becomes a means to not discover and articulate, but affirm a general, theoretical truth about reality. When the character of doubt is constructed before it is looked into, the criticality borne by doubt becomes a calculated unfreeing that limits us from the discovery of reality. We are ‘caught under the net’, and as hard as we try, we can never get close to that which we wish to grasp (Figure 5).

As that which posits the moral standing of one position as fundamentally superior to the other, hypocrisy limits, devalues and denigrates the freedom and agency of both the persons of the artist and the critic. Criticality and doubt become the arbitrators, not the facilitators of the discovery of reality – under the duress of theory, the object of artistic creation does not as freely reveal the character of that discovery, but instead, slavishly serves itself to the putative assertion and articulation of the shape of a theoretical position that claims to be

the ethical and the correct way to articulate the nature of one’s being within the pathos of reality. In a critical turn that is closer to the much abhorred purely heteronomous mode of criticality, the work of artistic creation, fed by seed of pseudo-doubt claims to be the expressive apotheosis of a theoretical position about what and how it is to be with and within reality. The work then claims to aesthetically establish a theoretical truth about the nature of experience materially; in its shift away from freedom of discovery towards unfreedom of certainty, the work panders to theory, and becomes an artifice borne by limitation. The object of artistic creation ends in itself before its self is even made present to the eye of the beholder.

July 2018 For a young artist at the beginning of their trajectory, the desire to pander to theory runs rife -- one is consistently pushed into qualifying the process of artistic creation in terms of a theoretical position. The doubt which facilitates the pursuit of reality, a need central to the creation of an artistic work is rendered stillborn at worst, facile at best. The process of looking is continually adduced

to serve a theoretical end that does not allow the work to begin, but instead, ends it before it has even given bounds to itself. When writing about the 2018 Peers Residency at Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi, I may accord or couch the work of the artists, Damayanti Debnath, Dharmendra Prasad, Manjot Kaur, Shreya Shukla, Throngkiuba Yimchungru, Virendra Maurya, or a theoretical end. It is nonetheless, futile for me to do so; to use the voice of the critic to confine the discovery of the world their works articulate within a theoretical position would be a limitation in itself. What I can do, what I can say, what I can speak of when I look, is to simply remind you that the work of artistic creation only lives when it is faithful to the process of the discovery of that which is particular and not a progress towards an absolute, general truth dressed in the guise of theory. The ultimate goal of a residency for artists that invites artists to embark upon the pursuit of the discovery of reality in togetherness is not to simply upturn pedagogical practice in formal terms, but to instead, break the cycle of hypocrisy that debilitates the eye before it begins to see and articulate that which lies in its vision. It is not relevant, nor does it matter that the work the Peers have produced be theoretically pertinent or reflective of an undercurrent within the established mood of our times. For a critic, it is to say little, if anything at all to simply describe or theorise or articulate the success or failure of any of the artists’s work in terms of a point of view. The purpose, the reason, the actual condition of the exercise of criticality is now not to simply posit the virtue of one position over the other, but to instead, return the value of doubt back unto to itself. We cannot look if we cannot see, and it is only when we look through the glass that we see the person of the other as equals, and look as frail as we are, face to face (Figure 6). “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known.” - Corinthians 1:13 (King James Version) Sukaina Husain

Edinburgh, September 2018

1–Tzvetan Todorov in Gila Walker (trans.), The Limits of Art: Two Essays (London; New York; Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2010), p. 68. 2–St. Augustine in M.H. Abrams, ‘Kant and the Theology of Art’, Notre Dame English Journal, 13(3) (1981), p. 89. 3–Todorov (2010), p. 68. 4–Ibid., p. 89. 5–Ibid., pp. 73-4. 6–Todorov (2010), p. 79. 7–Simone Weil in Emma Craufurd (trans.), ‘Attention and Will’ in Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1952). 8–Murdoch in Todorov (2010), pp. 79-80.

DAMAYANTI DEBNATH The decorum you shouldn’t maintain Space, wood, fiber sheet, enamel paint, LED light strip Ekphrasis Standing on red stilts, the picture seen in the eye of the mind comes to life. The flatness of paint rendered into a solid structure. A stand-in for the body of the page, painted wooden stilts rise from a floor, now turned into a picture plane. A painting in high-rise, sheets of clear plastic held together in wooden frames, looking through their own windows into the face of the other. An illumined light brings them forth, priming the surface with the dazzle when owes to the luminosity of white paint. An excavation that zooms the body that moves into the picture itself. Standing up, standing with upturned hands, palms facing forward, submitting to the structure beholding one’s self. She speaks to me, and she speaks to me again; I am somehow moving here, permeating within her picture. Strategies of movement, strategies of control, articulation is the product of a desire to move those that behold. Why say anything? Why say anything at all? Perhaps I say because I want you to know, perhaps I say because I want you to see.

Damayanti Debnath is a visual artist whose family migrated from Bangladesh in the time of Partition and settled in the northern part of Kolkata. After studying economics, Debnath completed her B.F.A. degree in Painting from the College of Art and Design at Bardhaman University and M.F.A. from S.N. School, Central University of Hyderabad (2018). Her work has been exhibited at: Annual Exhibition of College of Art and Design (2016), Open Studio S.N.School of Arts & communication (2018), Annual Exhibition S.N.School “Site specific installation” (2018), and at KHOJ (2018).

She lives and works in Kolkata.

DHARMENDRA PRASAD LandEscape Materials: Cattle fodder (paddy straw), books, mud, ropes, projection Ekphrasis: A room of hay; lying in great piles, mixed with glue and water, a slurry of brown, pseudo-organic sludge plastered from wall to floor. Deep in a primeval past, a cow moos out into the distance. The cycle of sowing, tilling, caretaking, harvest, rest is the only beat that remains of a deep, continuous past. Aside; an enclosure in which one stands at bay, in the impasse between the harvest of end and the beginning of yet another tomorrow. Then, choice, possibility and the calculation of yield. Tilling the soil of origin is an exercise in vain -- a resounding landmark to a listless memory transmogrified into the present. In a white room set to sound of a rum-tinged buzz of conversation, a curator politely shouts at a woman. Beseeching her to not smoke a cigarette in the presence of hay, lest the work and its house begin to burn. The quaint past is tragic, comic. A simple picture, snatched from its site of origin is now simply here amongst other things, as silent as the great pages ensconced within the enclosure bordered by hay. Right now it breathes only slightly, if at all.

Dharmendra Prasad received his M.F.A. (painting) from University of Hyderabad. He is a founding member of Anga Art Collective (2010) based at Guwahati. He participated in Pepper House Residency Exhibition, Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018-19), PEERS Artists’ Residency at Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi (2018) and was selected for Collection bureau – a pollinator project, India Art Fair, New Delhi (2018). He was part of the UKERI Project Exhibition, Wimbledon College of Arts, London (2015).

He lives and works in Assam.

MANJOT KAUR Constant Motion Time-Based Media Glass shelves, glass beakers, silver nitrate solution, copper wire, Internet, two-channel video, Ekphrasis Captured in jars, a microcosm of life in miniature. Taxonomically classified into form and substance, eviscerated from life onto the body of a copper surface. Yearning to live, growing, becoming something, if anything at all. Zooming in, zooming out of life, moving image against stolid jars of glass. Stuck on the surface, things remain what they are, even when they try and become what they are not. it is the moving mountain in aerial perspective, a landscape from above, entrapped in vision. Paint dries and silver crystals live, yet both lie trapped in a tasvir of themselves. Where the eye begins, the attempted picture ends, and when the eye wanders, that attempt begins to disintegrate. Benign attempts to resuscitate all that which goes on are a painterly folly, yet do we not linger on, in our hope to capture a picture of an essence as it begins to live.

Manjot Kaur has been an artist in residence at Unidee, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy; Museo Casa Masaccio Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, San Giovanni Valdarno (Italy) – a cross-institutional program with Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, India; Khoj International Artists’ Association – PEERS (2018), New Delhi; Mythos – Land Art Biel/ Bienne, Switzerland (2017); Gram Art Project - funded by FICA, India (2016); Harmony Art Foundation, Mumbai, India (2015); Global Nomadic Art Project, India (2015).

She lives and works in Chandigarh.

SHREYA SHUKLA Untitled Plaster of Paris, tarpaulin, text, video projection, water Ekphrasis Viscera. Concave index of a body splayed; a brief witness to time. Chthonic waters of the simple past–a completed action in a time before now. Efflux seeping from ceiling to floor, dripping slowly as refuse does, seeping across the surface onto a tarpaulin floor. Morbid. Remains of a body dying, living; moving, in and out between the recesses of darkness and light. An eternal return. The scarab beetle, borne of the womb of skies, emerges infinitely, transforming night into the rising day. Mucus like fluid splayed between limb of wall and door breaks across the floor. It seeps outwith, regenerating, transforming infinite repetition, without alteration in each and every moment. Time is a woman most fertile, only when stood against the staid monotony of the ticking clock.

Shreya Shukla’s work is informed by an inquiry of the human body and it’s transition, both literally and metaphorically. She holds a Masters of Visual Arts and a Bachelors of Visual Arts in the discipline of Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, Gujarat. She has participated in a number of exhibitions including PEERS Open day, Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi (2018); Young Subcontinent ,Curated by Riyas Komu Serendipity Arts Festival , Goa (2017); Archival Dialogues, a group exhibition curated by Pronoy Chakraborthy, Priyasri Art gallery , Kothachiwadiv, Mumbai (2017); Student’s Bienniale, Kochi Muziris Bienniale, Kochi (2016). She is also a recipient of Inlaks Fine Arts Award (2018), Tata Trust Students’ Bienniale International Award (2017) and Nasreen Mohamedi Scholarship Best Display Award (2016).

She currently lives and works in Baroda.

THRONGKIUBA YIMCHUNGRU Ideologies and People Emulsion primer, adhesive, CaCo3, acrylic on canvas Ekphrasis A compulsion to discern the purpose of the need to articulate. Why do anything? Why do anything at all? A question of choice involves peeling layers of paint once the paint itself has begun to dry. Work is hard, work is difficult; one waits constantly, waiting for life to begin, the day to end, and the beginning to end. How much can one man do? How can one say and still not say enough? A slurry of words mixed with a desire to move – the result is an exalted attempt to improve. A humble servant beckons his kinfolk, standing at the altar much like a pastor. His hands are raised and he begs, silently in hope that they will obey and see between the lines. Yet he is unknown most to himself, his means are necessary, but his purpose is unclear.

Throngkiuba Yimchungru received his Masters in Fine Arts from Santiniketan Visva-Bharati University, India and BFA from The Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Kolkata. He had his first solo exhibition in 2017 at Sarang Building Kersan Art Foundation, Yogyakarta and has participated in group exhibitions both nationally and internationally including. He has participated in a number of residencies including BetOnest, Brandenburg, Germany, KHOJ International Artists Association Delhi, and Kersan Art Foundation residency, Yogyakarta. He is also an ArtSlant Prize Showcased Juried Winner, USA (2017), and also participated in the Open Call exhibition at Apexart, New York. He is currently a Guest Assistant Professor in the Rajiv Gandhi University (Public).

He lives and works in Arunachal Pradesh.

VIRENDRA MAURYA Let me emerge through my body Doors, wood scraps, plastic, paper, mud, and other found materials Ekphrasis A compulsion to discern the purpose of the need to articulate. Why do anything? Why do anything at all? A question of choice involves peeling layers of paint once the paint itself has begun to dry. Work is hard, work is difficult; one waits constantly, waiting for life to begin, the day to end, and the beginning to end. How much can one man do? How can one say and still not say enough? A slurry of words mixed with a desire to move – the result is an exalted attempt to improve. A humble servant beckons his kinfolk, standing at the altar much like a pastor. His hands are raised and he begs, silently in hope that they will obey and see between the lines. Yet he is unknown most to himself, his means are necessary, but his purpose is unclear.

Virendra Maurya was born in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. He received his B.F.A. from Visual Art faculty (BHU) and M.F.A. from Sarojini Naidu School of Fine Art (H.C.U.). Having grown up in a traditional farming family, his practice is informed by natural materials and the environment. He also draws from his childhood memories of sculpture making and playing games. Maurya’s group exhibitions include: Dhi Artspace Gallery (2018), Khoj PEERS residency (2018), National Camp of Kerala, Lalit Kala Academy, organized by Trivandrum Art College (2017), Birla Academy of Art exhibition (2016), and Prarambh, India’s 1st Student Art Festival (2015).

He currently lives in Hyderabad.

SUKAINA HUSAIN Critic in Residence Sukaina Husain holds Masters and undergraduate degrees in the History of Art from the University of Edinburgh. An art historian by training, she is interested in practices of looking and philosophies of perception in visual culture in South Asia. Her critical interests are an extension of her academic work -- at present, she interested in processes of looking and criticality in contemporary South Asian art.

Sukaina Husain holds Masters and undergraduate degrees in the History of Art from the University of Edinburgh. An art historian by training, she is interested in practices of looking and philosophies of perception in visual culture in South Asia. Her critical interests are an extension of her academic work -- at present, she is interested in processes of looking and criticality in contemporary South Asian art.

She currently lives and works in Delhi.

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ABOUT KHOJ Khoj International Artists’ Association is a not-for-profit, contemporary art organisation based in New Delhi, which provides physical, intellectual and financial support for artists and creative practitioners. Through a variety of programmes including workshops, residencies, exhibitions, talks, and community art projects. Khoj has built an international reputation as an outstanding alternative arts incubation space. Since 1997, Khoj has developed itself as a unique ‘art lab’, and has supported the experimentation of many leading Indian and International artists. It plays a central role in the advance of experimental, interdisciplinary, and critical contemporary art practice in India - constantly challenging the established thinking about art. KHOJ TEAM Director Pooja Sood Programmes Mario D’Souza Mila Samdub Radha Mahendru Administration and Finance Manoj VP Laxmi Devi Arun Chhetrri Manohar Bhengra Media Suresh Pandey

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