KHOJ International Artists’ Association launches of its landmark publication-THE KHOJBOOK April 23, 2010

Title: THE KHOJBOOK (1997-2007)
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 680
Price: 5999/-

KHOJ International Artists’ Association launches its landmark publication THE KHOJBOOK that takes a consolidated view of contemporary art practice in India during the dynamic decade- 1997-2007. Published by HarperCollins, the book marks the completion of ten glorious years of Khoj International Artists’ Association.

Says Pooja Sood, Editor, THE KHOJBOOK: “THE KHOJBOOK took birth with a desire to mark the first ten years of Khoj International Artists’ Association. What began as a celebratory impulse has, however, shifted into a consolidated reflection of art practice in India during 1997-2007. It has taken us three complete years to put together thought-provoking and insightful essays that would provide the reader and researcher with material in the artist’s own words. The book contains interviews of Indian artists who have passed through our doors at Khoj over a decade, while the essays by eminent art critics and thinkers situate and critique Khoj itself within a wider art historical context. I hope that the interviews of the artists and by the artists would not only contribute to contemporary discourse and learning but would also inspire those conversations between peers to continue.”

The unique compendium contains five lead essays by eminent art critics and thinkers of our time, and interviews of 101 Indian artists by fellow artists. The essays include: Mapping Khoj: idea | place | network by Pooja Sood, A phenomenology of encounters at Khoj by Geeta Kapur, Coming to terms with restlessness: An essay offered in friendship to Khoj by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Probing the Khojness of Khoj by Nancy Adajania and The unbearable confusion around the idea of institutions by Rahul Srivastava. The interviews of the artists, however, have been placed in accordance with the respective year an artist has worked with Khoj. Some of the prominent names include: Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Manisha Parekh, Jitish Kallat, Riyas Komu, Bose Krishnamachari, Sumedh Rajendran, Sunil Gawde, Ashim Purkayastha, Tejal Shah, Sheba Chhachhi, Shilpa Gupta, Baiju Parthan, Jagannath Panda, Babu Eshwar Prasad, Ranbir Kaleka, Sudarshan Shetty, Pushpamala N, Jayashree Chakravarty, Navjot Altaf, Arunkumar HG, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Sovan Kumar, Gigi Scaria, Nikhil Chopra and Ravi Agarwal among others.

Lavishly illustrated with over a 1000 coloured images of art works, this 680-page book covers not only some of India’s foremost contemporary artists, but also younger artists across the country who may well be the future vanguard. It offers the reader, researcher, student, collector and art aficionado a rich store of material ‘in the artist’s own words’ from which to draw their own inspiration and conclusions.

Writes Geeta Kapur in her essay A phenomenology of encounters at Khoj: “Khoj has been especially conducive to site-specific works. It began when the concept and desire to work with perishable materials and temporary structures, with erasable signs and the artist’s own body, had just surfaced on the Indian art scene. Khoj’s initial activity (1997-2001) was situated in Modinagar in the outskirts of Delhi, in a township built around the factories of the Modis. Khoj was lucky to be offered the Sikribagh estate for its two-week winter workshops hosting 20-24 artists. The Sikribagh environs included a bungalow and outhouses, gardens and a large pond, with fields extending to wilderness. These were explored in the work of the artists who then crossed the big iron gates of the estate to forage in the local market for usable stuff and for modest manufacture of artworks. They hung out at the local dhabas and, in a few cases, developed a sociological interest in the operations of the national bourgeoisie as it disinvests businesses, abandoning the working class to virtual penury. A designated ‘Open Day’ for spectators – mostly artist-visitors from Delhi ferried across for a viewing – brought the art-idyll to critical attention. Modest by international standards, Khoj thus inaugurated an art practice embedded in nature and common culture; an informal, everyday practice of no extraordinary consequence except as a way of living it out in a temporary commune with basic facilities in what was already a highly mobile global residency circuit.”

According to Shuddhabrata Sengupta (as taken from the essay Coming to terms with restlessness: An essay offered in friendship to Khoj): “As a witness to and participant in the emerging conversation on contemporary art and cultural practice in Delhi, I, like many others have seen Khoj grow, change shape, find new lodgings, and settle into the life of the city, and the wider world of art-making. What has struck me is the diversity and variety of the kinds of people and practices that have passed through Khoj. From the earliest workshops, to the residencies, events, performances, exhibitions, discursive encounters and other kinds of gathering that Khoj has facilitated, the entire range has been impelled by the possibility of the unexpected encounter. Artists who pass through Khoj (especially those on more stable residencies) play a significant role in shaping the space through their presence. Each residency, each event changes Khoj. But the spine, the backbone, of Khoj is built out of the serendipitous possibilities that outlast the temporal dimensions of a specific unexpected encounter between different practices and practitioners. Sometimes, the chance meeting between different people at a Khoj event matures into long-lasting bonds that occasionally transcend even very difficult geo-political barriers. This process is the most efficient guarantee of Khoj’s continuity. Khoj will endure as an institution because it has engendered a community of art practitioners, and as long as that community desires its bonds, Khoj will continue to receive its human sustenance.”

According to Nancy Adajania (as taken from the essay Probing the Khojness of Khoj): “The coming together of any group of creative minds must be celebrated as a festival of the imagination. The advent of the Khoj International Artists’ Workshop in 1997, with the formation of a working group comprising six artists and a gallery director, is such a benchmark in the history of postcolonial Indian art. The achievement of the Khoj model is that it has transformed the lives and work of its practitioners. It has anticipated and provided for the consequences of the mobility that globalisation has imparted to Indian artists in the postcolonial world. By amplifying their context from nation to region to globe, Khoj has produced a valuable platform and network – one that gives them the latitude, the depth of field and the tactical flexibility to deal with a range of emerging art-historical provocations. Khoj has made them aware, over the years, of possibilities that they can pursue, artistic choices that they can empower themselves to make. And thus, in an art situation that was for nearly four decades many steps behind its Western point of reference, Khoj registered, for the first time, the sensation of being many steps ahead. Its emphasis on process, rather than product, liberated artists from the commodity focuses of the gallery system; its lively laboratory atmosphere brought Indian cultural producers into close communion with colleagues from other countries, breaking down the nation-centric self discourse then in force.”