Rationale

For three decades, Khoj has functioned as a proposition to imagine and build alternative, other, and third systems of working and gathering. Founded in 1997, Khoj was taking shape in a moment of infrastructural scarcity and intellectual hunger. It was a time when Indian arts lacked models for artist-led experimentation. There was no blueprint to follow. Communication was slow. Networks were fragile. Yet the need for dialogue was urgent.

Rooted in Delhi, and based in Khirki, a neighborhood that embodies India’s contradictions, Khoj has continually responded to its context. It has been discreet and underground when necessary, frugal in structure but generous in spirit. It has thrived not on institutional power but on friendships, collaborations, and the belief that art can push against hardened binaries and dominant modes of knowledge production.

Over time, Khoj has shifted shape: from artist-run to curator-led, from a space for residencies to a research incubator, from hyperlocal experimentation to attempting to connect the Global South. It has legitimized practices that exist outside the market, beyond it and before it. It has invested in forms that are temporal, collaborative, research-based, and often resistant to commodification.

Now, at 30, Khoj stands at another threshold. The 2020s have been marked by a global pandemic, ecological collapse, militarization, rising polarization, and widening inequalities. Shrinking public spaces have altered how communities gather and speak. In such times, the questions that inform Khoj’s practice feel sharper than ever:
What can art do?
What can art be?

Rather than a retrospective or a nostalgic look back, Khoj’s 30-year anniversary offers a forward-looking proposition. It is a moment to respond to the present, continuing a practice that has long defined Khoj: responding to geopolitical urgencies while holding space for conversation, speculation, research, and collaboration.

On Being Included by Sara Ahmed

I believe artists have a unique role, different than that of journalists, political leaders or even documentary filmmakers. Beyond parsing the facts of a situation or deliberating and brokering political solutions, artists work to bring human richness and complexity to experiences like conflict and strife.

If the public trusts the art world to do their work with rigour and honesty, artists and arts institutions can be a community of voices expressing diverse perspectives on our collective humanity, reflecting suffering and the power of resistance to violence in this polarizing conflict.

We must critically assess the value of the arts and of artists to perform this important work. And we should be mindful of desires to discipline the art world at a time when its voices are so deeply needed.

Reframing the Present
Contemporary Art, Cultural Heritage, and Social Justice

Asia as Method by Kuan-Hsing Chen

“During the war, art became a means of survival for me,” said Murad Al-Assar via a translator. “Through painting, I was able to release my pain and distress, transforming fear into images that tell our stories. The experience taught me that painting is not just an aesthetic space, but a testimony to our lives and a means of conveying our voice to the world.”

How do you recreate home again and again and again?

Within representation’s ruin, what used to be “outside” of capitalism—like marginality, queerness, or race—has been symbolically incorporated and deprived of its capacity to disrupt and contest. Figures of otherness have disappeared and been subsumed into “lifestyle” options. The underclass is a blurry horizon disconnected from the flows of global capitalism; far from being a political figure, the underclass is sometimes subject to site-specific intervention, pacification, betterment, development, and community-building projects. Its emancipatory horizon lies in entrepreneurship. Moreover, in the twenty-first century politics is no longer representative, but what some theorists call “post-politics.” Following Jodi Dean, this means that politics now aspires to a superficial democracy that neutralizes antagonism and denies democracy’s limits and mechanisms of exclusion. “Post-politics” thus implies the disavowal of the fundamental division conditioning politics, as equality has come to mean inclusion, respect, and entitlement. “Post-politics” means consensual politics, the end of ideology, the neoliberal withering away of the state in some areas and its strengthening in other strategic ones, and the financialization of the economy.

If traditional forms of power were representative and lodged in institutions and persons, power is now hidden in infrastructure (a highway, a supermarket, software, fiber optics, a data center, corporate providers of energy and water) and materialized as spatial arrangements. Post-representative forms of power manifest themselves as the organization, design, and configuration of the world; these forms of power are architectural and impersonal, as opposed to representative and personal. Moreover, politics is also post-ideological, which means that critical disposition, symbolic gesture, political position, and everyday life are completely dissociated.

One of the questions that urgently needs to be asked concerns the role that contemporary art plays in geopolitics, if we consider the art world as an industry, as the harbinger of neoliberalism, and as a tool for pacification, normalization, and gentrification.

Foucault defined two types of politically involved intellectuals: “outcasts,” who engage in actions that are regarded as subversive or “immoral” by bourgeois society (i.e., Jean Genet); and “socialists,” who use discourse to reveal particular truths (i.e., Rosa Luxemburg). Intellectuals had traditionally taken the latter role, serving as “the consciousness of the people.” The events of May ’68, however, marked the awareness that the masses no longer needed intellectuals to represent them or to describe their various forms oppression. For Deleuze, the role of the intellectual was no longer to situate himself ahead of workers, but to contest the very forms of power that position intellectuals as producers of knowledge. Thus, what was problematized by May ’68 was precisely the notion of the “representative consciousness.” Intellectuals had been rendered aware of how they propagate discourses of power disguised as “knowledge,” “consciousness,” and “truth.” For Foucault and Deleuze, there could be no representation, not because there wasn’t a signifier (“archaism”) that could bring together a given group based on common interests, but because in “speaking for others,” there is always an unconscious desire operating: to know, appropriate, and have power over the Other, denying him or her the right to self-consciousness.

In the domain of art, after the shifts prompted by the ruin of aesthetic-political representation (manifested in philosophy as post-structuralist theory), artists developed conceptual art strategies that aimed to dematerialize the art object in order to resist its ever increasing status as a commodity. Through institutional critique they began to question the conditions of art production, and through a pedagogy of viewership, they made art (most notably video art) that sought to counter the spectacle.

Under the site-specific intervention model of the biennial, space came to be regarded as epistemically rich; delivering experiences or intervening in everyday processes took over from representation. Site-specific art sought to infuse social criticism into the everyday. As a moral statement, however, site-specific intervention became the limit of its own political effect. Confined within the art world, it provided contrasts and pointed at potentials, yet fell short of modifying the background of political turmoil, and even caused epistemic violence to the site in question. Site-specificity had been liberatory insofar as it had enabled the displacing of essentialized nation-state identities and had introduced the possibility of multiple identities, allegiances, and new meanings. This was prompted by what Susan Buck-Morss described as a compensatory fantasy that responded to the intensified fragmentation and alienation of an expanded market economy. Thus, in the “biennialized” art world, multiculturalism, polyphony, and marginality actually came to affirm white hegemony, insofar as they expressed a moral struggle for recognition.

In parallel with the antiglobalization agenda, a current in art production sought to experiment with different forms of collectivity and community beyond identity and processes of identification. Relational art of the 1990s was the catalyzer for transient communal gatherings that sought to revive social relations and counter the alienation brought about by the spectacle. This form of art, described by Nicolas Bourriaud, envisioned the audience as a community and unfolds in the realm of human interactions, elaborating meaning collectively. Instead of having a “utopian” agenda, relational artists sought to find provisional solutions in the here and now; this is why relational artworks insisted on being used rather than contemplated.

Artists are less and less keen to separate creativity, exhibition venues, and the sponsors that support them. They are reluctant to give credibility to sponsors that fund art in order to whitewash their own crimes. These political acts—which involve taking a position, issuing demands, and boycotting—are different from the politically engaged practices I elucidated above, which have used the art world as a strategic space for political discussion and experimentation.

We hereby announce from here, from the land of Gaza, the launch of the Gaza Biennale, with the participation of over 40 artists, to affirm that Palestinian art pierces through all besieged spaces. No war can stop the dreams of dreamers, and no mechanisms of domination extinguish the light in the hearts and minds of creators. On behalf of all the participating artists, including those who, due to war and geographical division, are unable to join us physically, we affirm the following:

1) Through art, we resist all forms of genocide and oppression.

2) We continue to give and create, despite all obstacles and challenges.

3) Through art, we transcend barriers, ensuring that the voices of Palestinian artists reach the world, reaffirming Palestinian’s right to speak and be heard.

4) The Biennale represents the starting point for collective artistic work, uniting many parties and institutions that believe in the justice of our cause and the power of art.

5) The Biennale emerged despite dispersion, displacement, and suffering endured by artists, gathering to fill a need—for invention, dignity and purpose, we present a vision for a better future.

This Biennale is a call to the world, to artists and cultural institutions, to stand in solidarity with Palestinian artists, support them, and work together to ensure that their voices and stories remain present, and that their works remain a testament to struggle and resilience, lighting a path for humanity in the most dire times.

Anurupa Roy- for the Khirkhee Festival
Anurupa Roy is a puppeteer, puppet theatre director and puppet designer. She
is the founder and managing trustee of the Kat-Katha Puppet Arts Trust, a puppet
theatre group based in Delhi, India since 1998.
Kat-Katha also focuses on collaborative processes and projects with other artists,
communities, schoolteachers and children. These explorations have taken them to
conflict zones like Kashmir, Manipur and Sri Lanka, to Juvenile Remand homes in
Delhi, to Women’s self help group across villages in Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand,
Tamil Nadu and Kashmir and to schools across India. They have performed shows
across urban slums in India, trained community health workers, village school
teachers, youth leaders to use puppets to talk about taboo issues like reproductive
health and sexuality, the stigma around HIV/AIDS, gender discrimination and
violence.
Her work sits at the intersection of narrative manipulation and visual storytelling. She’d offer a cross-disciplinary take on how
manipulated “truths” shape public imagination.

Idea for the round table and bringing back international artists

Why should Khoj do this? Focussing on the Global South, alternative storytelling, histories of mediums, questioning truth-making (local/hyperlocal and international)

Knowledge-making as a lens: (First part)-----international
Questioning “objective” knowledge systems. For example, museum labels, history, colonial-archives etc. They’re built within power structures, usually privileging a Western, male, colonial gaze.

Suggested artists:
Heman Chong- Call for the Dead
Rakhi Peswani
Ramesh Mario
Shilpa Gupta
Agan Harahap
Dayanita Singh

Storytelling as a lens: (Second part- almost as a response)----local/hyperlocal
Works as a continuation
Deals with limits of knowledge-making, does not claim objectivity–but leans into emotional, qualitative, and personal pov or voice. Narratives of individuals or communities written by themselves, especially when someone else has spoken for them. Hidden histories.
Blurring truth and fiction, the focus is not on proving truth but rather feeling it. Rehumanizing ways of seeing—theres multiple ways of looking at something.
Whose voice is missing?

Dawn Ng
Sohrab Hura
Munem Wasif
Aastha Butail
Jason Wee
Gurjeet Singh