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Peers 2010
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
Every summer, five artists along with a critic work at the KHOJ studios for the duration of the Peers residency. This programme enables young artists to shed the expectations and rigidity of a structured curriculum, helping them to work together in a discursive space that stresses the role of free experimentation and risk-taking in art practice. Peers is supported by the India Foundation of the Arts, Bengaluru.
The artists for the 2010 edition were: Rabindra Patra, whose art engages with the notion of power through a variety of materials; Bhavin Mistry, who worked on a sound and video installation meditating upon the claustrophobia of constricted living spaces in urban India; Malik Sajad, now the acclaimed author of Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir, whose art evocatively renders the realities of life in his tortured homeland; Agat Sharma, who attempted to understand the city and its relationship to consumption through his interdisciplinary practice during the residency; and Neha Thakar whose innovative work was shaped by her visits to the perfume shops in Old Delhi and her evolving conceptions of research.
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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.
