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Peers 2005
The Khoj Peers residency program provides emerging artists and creative practitioners a platform for dialogue, experimentation, and exchange. This helps in building a forum and creating a network of young interdisciplinary artists from various art, architecture, new media, performance, performing arts and design disciplines.
About this edition
The Peers Student Residency is a platform, initiated with support from the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), that provides an invaluable opportunity for exchange and dialogue. The artists invited for Peers 2005 represented a wide cross section of geographies and disciplines. For four weeks, five young artists spent time working and living together. It was a time for interaction, collaboration, and most importantly, a time for exploration and some serious fun.
In the 2005 residency, the participants created a diverse range of artworks, beginning from Himanshu whose practice interrogated the insularity of the art world and explored emancipatory possibilities; Bhupal whose creative preoccupation with taking art out of gallery spaces and into the public domain led him to push existing horizons; Rajesh whose totemic piece at KHOJ strove to shed light on the state of the girl child in India,to Malvika, whose video installation juxtaposed visuals from World War II, Ayodhya, and Delhi by night in an attempt to examine the duplicitous aesthetics of glitz and glamour, and Sanhita who studied the phenomenon of physical pain through her work.
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As a forum that aims to actively push the envelope of contemporary art practice mediated through practices that foreground qualities of experimentation, invention, research and critical debate, KHOJ positions PEERS as a model for practice as research within the ambit of the visual arts. KHOJ provides an opportunity for a diverse group of artists to test their work within a setting that is part public, part private. The residency practices an investigative approach that is open-ended and enigmatic, it celebrates a diverse scene of artists all responding in different ways to each other and to the site/building. A speculative approach to the production of art results in a distinct educational experience which foregrounds improvisation, reworking and allowing room for errors.