Khoj and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, are pleased to announce the opening of ‘no steady state’, 5 curated exhibitions by the Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) 2024 Fellows.

Sprouting limbs, withering appendages. Borders drawn, redrawn. Species settle in, turn native. A garden plant becomes a cash crop.

Labour is contracted out—the contractor hired by another contractor. Regimes topple. A despot’s statue crashes down. A coalition forms, fractures, reforms. The market surges, crashes.

Viruses leap species, drift, mutate. Pests arrive uninvited and rewrite ecologies.

Wood is carved, metal is bent, plastic is moulded—the seat remains while the sitter changes.

Memory bends, warps, reshapes itself. Phantom limbs ache.

Languages form, dialects vanish. Scripts are etched, erased, rewritten. Algorithms wrestle chaos into code, but entropy outpaces command.

The bubble swells. The bubble bursts. The planet spins, hurls forward.

Objects fracture, landscapes shift. Depth is an illusion. Nothing is ever fully revealed. Nothing holds steady.

In this heady mix of constantly changing realities, metaphors of existence are reimagined. Boundaries are redrawn. Definitions are reconsidered. New languages are conceived, shaped by the need to make sense of a world in flux. Even as we seek anchors, we reject well-trodden shores.

no steady state emerges from instability. Constantly shifting landscapes, evolving identities, and changing historical contexts form the basis of this inquiry. Through installations, moving images, found materials, and speculative interpretations, these five exhibitions trace fractures, explore in-between spaces, and refuse fixation. They subvert the status quo to imagine alternate ways of being.

This exhibition invites us to dwell in uncertainty, to ask:
What remains? What disappears? And what forces shape our perception of permanence in a world that refuses to hold still?

Opening reception: March 21 from 6:30pm onwards at Khoj Studios, New Delhi
On view from March 22 – 29, 11am – 7pm at Khoj Studios, New Delhi

no steady state marks the culmination of the sixth edition of Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) 2024, a key program by Khoj and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi which brings together curators from India, Iran, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Reimagined this year as a month-long, fully-funded, in-situ research residency program, CISA offers curators the opportunity to establish contacts with cultural practitioners, researchers and academics, and build networks across India, South Asia and beyond. The aims to develop a diversity of perspectives on the medium of the exhibition in South Asia and Iran and to provide both a structured and an experimental inquiry into the possibilities of curatorial practice today.