May 23, 2026. I arrived at Lengpui airport without knowing if I would be able to board the plane. It was raining up until then and the sky was long overcast. It looked like we were waiting for a storm. The weather has not been the best the past few weeks I was home. The lady at the counter told me she would check me in, however, the plane might get delayed or even canceled. This was going to be my first time in Delhi, except for that one time in transit to another destination. I sat there, thinking how the next six weeks at Khoj would go with a salient uncertain feeling. The waiting room has at most only two flights waiting. It is a small airport. Lengpui sees 4-8 arrivals and departures most days and that too has regularly been delayed or cancelled in the recent past. Sitting there, holding my boarding passes that were paid for; waiting for a plane that might not depart, really made me reflect on the privilege I was sitting upon to afford such uncertainty.
Eventually, (in some time) we were called to board.
Art is an expensive endeavor. It runs at the expense of my father’s conditional approval, my mother’s blind trust, and the general confusion of what a residency even is among the people I know. What is contemporary art for people who can not afford to escape explanation? I stand positioned in the line between opposite borders. An insider of the art world to the people back home, yet I come from outside the margins of the seasoned Art world. These conditions never seem to escape the need for explanation on both sides. I had a hard time explaining to my mother what I will be doing at Khoj. You see, people back home historically have never afforded the luxury to understand art outside of functionality. Gallery walls and museum displays are out of the picture when your primary concern is security and survival. However, It is not to say art escapes these walks of life. It is present in the daily function of things, in everyday life.
Every culture has their own way of producing knowledge and is subjected to their own sensual conditioning. However, in the global village that we live in, we often look past the role of language in mediating perception of beauty or what is pleasing to the senses. Vocabulary in different languages extends to the need for words in the context it is produced. I was looking for a translation for art in Mizo and the closest thing I could find were concepts of specific mediums; lemziak means drawing, thil ker is carvings and many more. Other words that relate the most with my understanding of art are kutchhuak which means handiwork; and themthiam, the closest to artist. Themthiam literally translates to the quality of being an expert, knowing a craft, or being skilled. The word them is deeply rooted in craft, especially that of looming. All the parts that make up the tools used for Mizo loom started with them (thembu, them-tlang, them-tleng, them-te etc).
What we talk about when we talk about art?
I find myself here in the middle of it all asking questions like; what is art? and what is Art? It is easy to think when there is nothing to worry about but to think. Your stay paid for, food served, your actions accounted for. Dei! You don’t even have to suffer the worst of Delhi heat in this oasis of a place carved out between old buildings, street vendors, and unkempt roads in the gully of Khirkee Extension. To be in the Art world; to be writing about art requires that kind of luxury. On the other hand, the conditions that these works of art are produced in often tell a different story, and what creates Art and what Art creates, is a discussion up for grabs in every conversation I encounter so far during my stay here.
Worlds that don’t meet eye to eye sit down for conversation over dinner.
I arrived at Khoj determined to attempt an experiment. An experiment that I claimed is my practice in writing about art; to translate works of art back into the language of texts and words. The first translation happened on arrival. Sahil translated for me what Pancham explained about the house rules and what we need to know while we stay here at Khoj. I was worried because I do not speak Hindi. I realised that this was the same situation my friends were experiencing when they encountered the art world. They do not understand artspeak.
But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of his dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal? — R. F. Kuang
”In this studio,” Shuddhabrata said, “we speak the language of translation.” To me every conversation is a gamble of translation. Even if we speak the same language, our ways of knowing can be so profoundly different that we completely fail to understand each other. What is the fidelity of translation when it comes to languages like art? If art is a language; aesthetics its grammar. Then, what is aesthetics? How much weight should one put on aesthetics when making art? These questions came up when we visited Raqs Media Collective’s studio. Shuddha (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) likes to cross question; answer your questions in a way that makes you turn your mind’s dial a little and make you re-approach your question, set it in a different direction altogether. “What is the opposite of aesthetics?” He asked back. Aesthetics comes from the Greek word aisthesis meaning sense perception or feeling. Anaesthesia is the opposite of aesthetics. It means to not feel, to block out your senses. In a way, modern aesthetics as we understand it talks about what is familiar to our conditioned senses. But, art is not just about what is pleasing to the senses.
It’s astonishing how languages find its way into the cohort and became a disparate common ground of sorts pretty early on in the house. We all come from different places; follow different cultures, speak different languages, and grew up very differently. First introductions extended to demonstrations on how to pronounce names. A diverse cohort coming from Nagaland, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Mizoram. It takes a few tries for some of us to get it right. It is not a surprise. Names in languages that are otherwise foreign converge on the tongue that has been conditioned for the familiar.
The aesthetic tongue and the tyranny of a given name.
A-ri-e-n-o.
Arieno.
/a.ri.e.no/
It means “first born or first one to arrive” in Tenyidie. Arieno is the eldest of three sisters and her name reflects that. “Talking about names,” She said, “it also suggests the time and the situation in history the name is given, you know?” She talked about how people name their babies according to their family situations. Zhielhou, for instance, was born during a difficult time for the family so he was given the name likewise; zie means hard time or struggle, Ihou means to live. His younger brother was born when things were beginning to look up for the family, so he was named Vilhoutso; which means to live good to the end. Names in some way can also be a milestone in a bigger timeline.
The meaning of names came up again in the same conversation with Shudda. He shared that his name comes from Sanskrit and that it means “pure.” We talked about how these meanings create a kind of lingering pressure or expectation that persists in a given name leaving the bearer to unknowingly strive for the same. The given name, I feel, somehow has more to do with the giver than the one who bears it. However, the burden of the name is subjected to the one bearing it.
அணு
aṇu
/ɐnʊ/
The name is the first thing people know and associate your works and achievements with. The first thing I noticed about aṇu that stood out to me was that her name is spelled in Tamil script. அணு usually means atom or a beginning of sort in Tamil, but she did not choose it because of that. “It just feels right, you know?” She said when I asked. She talked about how her school teacher would spell her name differently and decided she can do the same. The nuance and differences that’s there in anu and aṇu is still something I can’t quite grasp when pronouncing it out loud.
“Sometimes, I feel like I would rather not have a name, you know?” aṇu said in one of our conversations. Words and names have so much power. It can be imposed on you and distort your understanding and perception of things and even yourself. 18.23.43 “You know this thing, Tamil Sangam; Sangam doesn’t even come from Tamil. It is a Sanskrit word that has been associated with Tamil scholarship somehow…
Evasive words and arguing semantics.
“Who are you?” She asked. We were talking, huddled up in one corner of Mithu Sen’s studio, “Are you an Artist?” Mithu has over three decades of experience in her practice. “What do you and I have in common?’ She provokes. What is an artist? What makes an Artist? aṇu was reluctant to answer, I could tell, and so were the rest of us. Words itself carries so much meaning and connotations that such a term like Art and Artist have questions looming overhead wherever it is used. Nevertheless, it has been thrown around so much that you begin to question if it is something you just are, something you already are or something you become. If it is even something you can become.
महिमा
Mahima
/mə.ɦɪ.mɑː/
“It takes these trees around 300 years to consider them native.” M told us in our Sanjay Van walkshop. They are a self-taught field mycologist and artist who have been working with the ecological conditions in Delhi. The urban ridge has a lot of species that migrated from different parts of the world with colonial expats. Most of these species do not belong here. Their conditions in the climate and weather gave it away. At the end of May, in the heat, we witnessed a lot of illness and deaths in the ecosystem. “I mean, who gets to decide that? Who gets to decide that 300 is the year you become native?”
Mahima is originally from Rajasthan but lived and grew up in Bengaluru. She sighed when we first talked about where we all come from. Mahima works with mycelium. It infestates—colonises the host and spreads—anything it is. “It also acts as a messenger in the ecosystem” She said. Mycelium facilitates communication through its network of fungal threads connecting the roots of trees and plants. If a tree is attacked by insects or diseases, it communicates to the other trees. But, until when one remains a guest and when one becomes the owner? I feel like the idea of belonging cannot be separated from possession, especially to a country, state, or a community. These possessions come in the form of evidence based on the metrics of the Other; oftentimes legal documents are required to prove that you belong.
नम्या
Namya
/ˈnʌmjə/
Namya who is stubbornly trying to break out of the condition that has made her a filmmaker never forgets to add ‘not a filmmaker’ every time she introduces herself. “Yeah, I make films.” She said, “But I don’t want to just be a filmmaker..” She added, “I want to do something new.” “What is new? What is ‘new’ to you? How do you define it?” Gauri asked in one of our weekly meetings at the residency. Is it something that has never been done before or something that you invented? To me, ‘new’ is something that is not familiar to me.
Namya taught me a slightly different translation that I haven’t thought of before but is vital to my own practice and experimentation. She wants to explore how accessibility itself can become a medium. Translating one sense to the other sense. It is fascinating really, how it challenges our assumptions about sensory hierarchy. For so long, art has been segregated by sense—visual art for eyes, music for ears, texture for the fingers, often in a ‘look don’t touch’ gallery space. Accessibility features, like audio descriptions or captioning, are treated as secondary translations, a charitable accommodation rather than an artistic act in itself.
When you translate a visual piece into sound, or a sonic experience into vibration, you aren’t just making it “accessible”; you’re creating a new work that exists in the gap between senses. This is synesthesia as a creative, critical tool. Once you accept that the act of translation is not a replication of one language to the other, one medium to another, you can play with what is lost and gained in the translation.
साहिल
Sahil
/sɑːˈhɪl/
“People ask,” Sahil told me when we were hanging out in his studio, “why I do not use colors in my paintings?” It seems to be a common question he gets from people when they see his work. “People forget that black and white is also colour!” He said. He explains how we see color only as chromatic saturation—reds, blues, yellows—and dismiss the enormous spectrum that exists within what we call “absence.” Black and white are not the lack of color; they are the presence of all colors combined or all light reflected. It’s a profound perceptual bias.
“I have a rough idea of what I want to paint.” He told me when I asked about his process. “But when I put a line down on the canvas, it’s almost like it becomes alive.” He said. The lines and forms begin to converse with each other and him. Points that extend to lines stretch up to how far you can go. How far you are willing to go. “Even though we think we can achieve so much, all of us need support at some point.” He said. No matter how much we think we can achieve, we all need support in the end.
27:41.76 “I love how you put this together and this is the whole motive of art, you know, where people speak to each other about it, okay? Talk about something that you generally don’t talk about.”
I have come to a preliminary diagnosis of what makes an artist. The conversations that we have when we sit down for dinner; the discussions that open up when we share the things we care about. These are the things we talk about when we talk about art. I’ve heard endless introductions about each individual’s practices repeated in every studio visit, and artists’ statements can only tell so much. These works come from what is generally talked about in conversations amongst ourselves. Art is yet just another language to talk about it.
“Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.” — Ken Liu