Established in 1997, Khoj International Artists’ Association, based in Delhi, is a key alternative forum for Indian artists as it has actively encouraged experimentation, collaboration and exchange through its residencies and workshops. Khoj has also been significant in linking Indian contemporary artists with artist communities in Asia, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Americas. With a View to encouraging and facilitating dialogue, exchange and curatorial collaborations between artists, curators and the art constituency, Khoj has been identified as the Nodal Centre for Visual Art Curatorial Practice, as part of me Curatorship programme. This grant will allow Khoj to host three curatorial residencies, conduct an art writing workshop and organise a four-day international seminar on critical curating.

The residency is envisioned for four curators, both Indian and international, who will be invited to the Khoj Studios in Delhi or to the other two nodes (in Bangalore and Guwahati) of the Khoj National Network. The duration of the residency will be two months, and will culminate in a project/exhibition curated by the two selected curators. As part of its mandate, Khoj will focus on bringing in young professionals from across India and the Sonth Asian region. While the effort will be to pair an international curator with an Indian participant, this is subject to raising fluids from various cultural centres including the Alliance Francaise, the Goethe Institute, Pro»He1vetia, the Japan Foundation and the British Council. Where it proves impossible to support an international curator, effort will be made to pair the two young Indian curators with counterparts from the South Asian region.

The resident curators shall be encouraged to delve into Khoj’s rich archive (aural, visual and textual) of past projects, to identify themes to curate process based art practices They will also have full access to the Khoj library, which is stocked with publications on critical theory and visual art practice as well as catalogues of important South Asian exhibitions. While archival exploration will form the backbone of the model for these curatorial residencies, the curators will engage with the cultural specificity and identity of the location within the national network in which they are situated. So for example, following from the ideas and politics of representation at Khoj Delhi, the resident curators will be introduced to a model of curating that functions outside the white-cube paradigm of galleries/exhibitions and work towards an exhibition model that is able to ‘represent’ processual art practices that defy containment within the traditional exhibition space. The first curators-in-residence programme will be hosted at Khoj Delhi, the second at l, Shanti Road Bangalore and the third at Periferry with the Desire Machine collective in Guwahati.

Khoj will also conduct a week-long writing workshop with the aim of energising the field of art writing in India. This art writing workshop will take place in the second year of the programme and has been conceived primarily for young professionals to understand culture writing, specifically in the realm of the visual arts. The workshop will encourage participants to describe, address, reflect upon, question and ‘enter into’ visual art writing, and by doing so consolidate the close link between curatorial practices and writing, There will be discussions and exercises with scholars, collectors, artists and writers, who will share their expertise. Some of the proposed themes for the workshop include: history of art writing and the relationship between criticism and history; writing about the Indian art market; catalogue writing—ethics and language; writing in art criticism; and art history and artists’ biographies. The Art Writing Workshop is scheduled for February 2012.

Also a four-day international seminar will be held at Khoj Studios Delhi in partnership with the De Appel Curatorial Training Programme, Amsterdam, and the Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo, with the aim of encouraging cross cultural dialogue on curating practices, positioning India as a recognised participant in the global art context. The lecturers and moderators will include major art and curating experts from India, Australia, China, UK, Belgium, Hungary, Egypt, Germany and Brazil. Some of the issues that will be addressed during the seminar will be: comparative exhibition histories across the hemispheres-historical to present day; institutional structures from seminal institution-building to post-institutionalism; urban festivals and biennials the long-term effects of temporary exhibitions; and the urgency or redundancy of vocational training prograrrunes for young curators. The International Seminar on Critical Curating is scheduled for February 2013. The Khoj website will be regularly updated with all information related to the curatorial projects.

Khoj’s unique approach, premised on a model of learning by exchange, has played a catalytic and stimulating role in the context of contemporary art practice in the country. The model of practice-based training evolved by Khoj over the years will allow for a distinct educational experience for young curators, foregrounding the spirit of inquiry outside the cosseted context of the academy. The residencies may be viewed as innovative learning centres where learning occurs through exchange. This model differs from pedagogical institutions, which divide learning and teaching roles, and segregate the acts of creating and critiquing art and lmowledge about art. Thus, the young curators in residence will not only benefit from the support and exposure provided at Khoj, but together they will help to expand the definition of curatorial practice and showcase a model that can be adopted by other institutional spaces, developing new possibilities for engagement between artists and the creative industries. As these curators will also engage with the activities of the other Nodal centres, energy will be created around curatorial thinking and practice, and together they will ensure that curatorial discourse takes serious precedence within the larger context of arts discourse.

 

This description is part of the institutional records created by IFA at the onset of the grant. The project may have changed in due course as reflected in the deliverables from the Grantee.