KHOJ, supported by Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, in collaboration with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, presented the exhibition Nameless Here For Evermore.

Nameless Here for Evermore brought together artistic practices that ask us to reflect on our implicit involvement in collective suffering, whether in the violence of Kashmir over the last decade, the Punjab and Delhi riots of 1984, the occupation of Afghanistan, the ‘greenhunt’ in the forests of Bastar, the competition and alienation of capitalist Taipei, or the anti-Communist purge of 1960s Indonesia. Our inability to adequately address and transform the wounds of collective trauma has often resulted in silence or stigma and the erection of all kinds of psychic and social barriers. Many such traumas have proven resistant to treatment in the traditional psychoanalytic clinic, while the social core of these traumas has been left more or less untouched by the various psy-professions.

At the same time, the assembled works also suggested that artistic practice, free from the ‘logic’ of the psychoanalytic clinic, has the potential to resonate with, diagnose, and change experiences of trauma, often with an unexpectedly new ‘language.’ Art can resist, it can remediate, it can heal. Each work exemplified how artists, as Deleuze (1997) argued, can frequently go further than clinicians, because ‘the work of art gives them new means.’