Khoj studios hosts Interactive Art Event at Select City walk from Jan 17-23, 2011 January 17, 2011

New Delhi: From January 17 for a week, Select City Walk mall in Saket will be transformed into an ‘art’ mall…and literally! Khoj International Artists’ Association, situated just a stone’s throw away from the swanky mall is hosting two diverse but equally interactive art events at the mall.

The first event which will start at the mall on Jan 17 is Shikaar: The Hunt, an innovative treasure hunt of artworks which will be on till January 23, 2011, from 5.30 p.m. daily. Curated by Gitanjali Dang, one of the curators who participated in the curatorial residency programme at Khoj studios in August last year, the treasure hunt hopes to draw parallels between human hunting and gathering and our fascination with this subsistence method, albeit with a twist. Says Dang: “I have chosen works (that have been hidden at the mall) by Aastha Chauhan, Atul Bhalla, Cynthia Zaven, Ingrid Hora, Navjot Altaf and Prajakta Potnis and a ‘hidden artist’.”

By now we are all more than familiar with the not altogether new strain of the hunter-gatherer that prefers stalking malls and seeking his/her subsistence in its glittering array of goodies. Needless to say, contemporary art is not above this.

More often than not, market, museum, artist, theorist, curator, critic, gallerist are all transfixed by a hunting-gathering tradition that is invariably enamoured of the iconic. But, of course, this paradigm has always been played out stealthily. With Shikaar: The Hunt it is our intention to do away with the safety net of stealth.

Delhi thrives and breeds in the shadow of the mall. Khoj International Artists’ Association at Khirkee Extension too cannot escape the irresistible shadow of the seven, no less, malls in its vicinity. No better place then to take to task the matter at hand, than at a destination where the art world, the treasure hunter and the mall rat, all blur into one another. By seeking the involvement each of these specimens one could amplify the varying levels of engagement within the hunt or indeed pinpoint that there aren’t any different levels of engagement, because everyone is prey to iconophilia.

For the hunt, the artworks have been scattered across the mall site. Clue maps will guide the participants to the artworks. No hunt is complete without prizes. And Khoj is offering daily prizes and much else.

The second event is the display of Bhogi/Rogi (consumption /Disesase), an interactive video sculpture by Sheba Chhachhi created in technical collaboration with Thomas Eichhorn. The installation will be on view from January 17, 2011 to January 23, 2011 at the central atrium at the mall.

The installation offers the viewer an experience of herself/himself as constituted and transformed by what she/he consumes – food, goods, words. It explores the relationship between consumption- production-homogenization; with particular reference to transgenic foods, through a series of real time transformations of the body self of the viewer.