The search continues

Ten years of Khoj, and going strong.

A tenth anniversary is a good time to look back and take stock. For Khoj, India’s foremost ‘alternate’ art institution, 10 years is an important milestone. It is a time to celebrate, to recall the triumphs, as also one to flag the failures and draw lessons for the future. The Khoj Book does both, and also provides a contextual and theoretical framework within which to place all the new-fangled art that has come out of Khoj over the years, the better to foster an ‘understanding’ of it.

The story of Khoj is a fascinating one, especially since the years 1997-2007 were also a time when Indian art, and perceptions of it, went through a huge shift. In her introductory essay, Pooja Sood (founding member and currently its artistic director), traces Khoj’s intellectual origins to the workshops initiated by Robert Loder and the Triangle Arts Trust in 1982, which brought together “artists from diverse cultural backgrounds [who] engage with each other to explore new ideas and expand the boundaries of their practice”.

 

In 1997, 24 artists who had attended these workshops in Africa decided to hold one in India. This was a two-week workshop in the winter of 1997, held at Modinagar, an industrial town some distance from Delhi. Half of the participants were Indian — among them Subodh Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty, Surendran Nair, Anita Dube and Gargi Raina, names that now enjoy instant recall in the world of Indian contemporary art. Of the rest, those from countries of the so-called Third World predominated — Iftikhar Dadi (Pakistan), Yoba Jonathan (Namibia), Luis Gómez (Cuba), Muhanned Cader (Sri Lanka), and so on.

Over the years Khoj expanded, carried along by the enthusiasm of the community of artists, curators and critics, its workshops, residencies, seminars and curated shows becoming a crucible for ‘open-ended’ experimentation in the visual, plastic and performing arts. A number of pathbreaking works in almost every branch of experimental art — performance, video, environment, community, sound — resulted, expanding the limits of the possible and permissible, not just for the audience who trickled in on ‘open day’, but also perhaps for the artists themselves. For a number of the artists their experiments at Khoj went on to inform their subsequent practice. Geeta Kapur, eminent art critic and curator, lists several including N S Harsha, Shilpa Gupta, Sheba Chhachhi, even Subodh Gupta, in this category in her essay, “A Phenomenology of Encounters at Khoj”. “Khoj can take credit for launching some of our artists whose practice has defined new parameters in Indian art,” she writes.

Of course it wasn’t an easy run. It never is for institutions that depend entirely on external funds to survive. Khoj has been relatively fortunate in finding access to a steady stream of domestic and international funders — Ebrahim Alkazi donated the first tranche of Rs 60,000, the Ford Foundation has been a big source, and so have the India Foundation for the Arts and the cultural missions of foreign embassies, not to forget Loder’s Triangle Trust, which also helped Khoj acquire its present premises in Khirkee village in New Delhi.

The book has been three years in the making. It’s a ponderous tome, both in terms of the critical thought that has gone into its compilation and its actual physical weight. Given how Khoj privileges accessibility, it is surprisingly unwieldy.

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THE KHOJ BOOK 1997-2007
CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICE IN INDIA
Editor: Pooja Sood
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 673
Price: Rs 5,999