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Peers 2008
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 2008 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.
The chosen artists for the 2008 residency were Prayas Abhinav, whose interdisciplinary experiments with new media continue to attempt creative interventions in the public space, Sandeep Pisalkar whose sculptures are informed by a strong sense of being composite in nature, Nisha Nair who engages in interventionist architectural projects in the cityscape, Manmeet Sandhu who had specialised in painting during her education but has subsequently used a variety of materials and modes, and Aatiya Thakur whose sculptural works are shaped by her creative preoccupation with the urban.
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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. This speculative approach to the production of art results in a distinct educational experience which foregrounds improvisation, reworking and allowing room for mistakes.
