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Peers 2006
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
PEERS is a 4-week residency program for recent graduates from art colleges across India, initiated with support from the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), which provides an opportunity for exchange and dialogue. The PEERS program hopes to create a regular forum for experimentation, development, and critique within an alternative educational framework.
PEERS 2006 brought together a diverse group of students from across the country onto a common platform, that works to provide an opportunity for open knowledge sharing within the group and the community. In the 2006 residency, the participants professed a wide range of creative interests, beginning from Atul Mahajan (Baroda) whose interactive works would be incomplete without the viewer’s participation; Atanu Pramanik (Santiniketan) who had trained as a printmaker but had begun moving into the realm of installation and mixed media; Lalit Bhartiya (Delhi), a sculptor from Jamia Millia Islamia who worked with metal rods twisted into ribbed human forms, to Surabhi Saraf (Ahmedabad), a painter whose background in classical Hindustani music and Kathak had led her naturally into audio-video installation works with a strong sense of performance and Thara Thomas (Bangalore) whose interest in shifting the boundary between public and private had led to an exploration of the relevance of art in public spaces.
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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.