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Khoj International Residency August-September 2026
Through the Khoj International Residency, Khoj wishes to support and incubate experimental creative practices that are across disciplines and are looking at art and its various intersections such as gender, urbanisms, ecology and technology.
About this edition
Khoj invites applications from artists whose practice engages with mental health and distress, critically examining how pain—physical, psychological, or historical—shapes both the self and society. How is suffering unequally distributed across race, caste, class, gender, and geography? How do individuals and communities navigate, resist, or reclaim forms of vitality in the face of war, colonial legacies, and systemic inequalities? Rather than defining mental health and illness solely in medical terms, we are open to a range of knowledge systems, forms of practice, and diverse concepts of vitality and distress.
This residency seeks to open up spaces for explorations of clinical and everyday experiences, as well as forms of myth and ritual as alternative or mainstream ways to understand and process pain. Ancestors, spirits, oral histories, and expressive traditions have long functioned as tools of healing. At the same time, digital cultures, new technologies, and clinical subjectivities are significantly reshaping ideas of the self, and influencing experiences of anxiety, coping, memory and aspiration. Bringing together artists and scholars from India and the UK, this residency seeks to explore varied forms of vitality and distress that shape contemporary life-worldsThis is an on-site six-week residency at Khoj Studios, New Delhi. Working in any medium, the artist is encouraged to expand the discourse on mental health, reimagining the self, its vulnerabilities, vitalities, wounds, and remakings.
Khoj is pleased to collaborate with SOAS’s Center for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) for this residency program.
CAMHRA is a globally oriented and locally connected hub for cutting-edge anthropological research, education, and public engagement in mental health. Through ethnographic research, education and public engagement, CAMHRA contributes distinctly anthropological perspectives to a growing global understanding of how societies can understand and respond to mental distress and build effective systems of care..
Please note: Only Indian and UK nationals are eligible to apply for the residency. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted via email.
Open for Applications
Khoj invites applications from artists whose practice engages with mental health and distress, critically examining how pain—physical, psychological, or historical—shapes both the self and society. How is suffering unequally distributed across race, caste, class, gender, and geography? How do individuals and communities navigate, resist, or reclaim forms of vitality in the face of war, colonial legacies, and systemic inequalities? Rather than defining mental health and illness solely in medical terms, we are open to a range of knowledge systems, forms of practice, and diverse concepts of vitality and distress.
This residency seeks to open up spaces for explorations of clinical and everyday experiences, as well as forms of myth and ritual as alternative or mainstream ways to understand and process pain. Ancestors, spirits, oral histories, and expressive traditions have long functioned as tools of healing. At the same time, digital cultures, new technologies, and clinical subjectivities are significantly reshaping ideas of the self, and influencing experiences of anxiety, coping, memory and aspiration. Bringing together artists and scholars from India and the UK, this residency seeks to explore varied forms of vitality and distress that shape contemporary life-worlds
This is an on-site six-week residency at Khoj Studios, New Delhi. Working in any medium, the artist is encouraged to expand the discourse on mental health, reimagining the self, its vulnerabilities, vitalities, wounds, and remakings.
Please note: Only Indian and UK nationals are eligible to apply for the residency. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted via email.
Application Deadline: 7 June 2026
For any queries please write to us at applications@khojstudios.org with the subject ‘International Residency 2026’.
Khoj is pleased to collaborate with SOAS’s Center for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) for this residency program.
CAMHRA is a globally oriented and locally connected hub for cutting-edge anthropological research, education, and public engagement in mental health. Through ethnographic research, education and public engagement, CAMHRA contributes distinctly anthropological perspectives to a growing global understanding of how societies can understand and respond to mental distress and build effective systems of care
