Peers is an annual art residency programme run by Khoj. The 2025 edition of Peers has been supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation and Tarana Sawhney.

Since its inception in 2003, the Peers Residency provides space for experimentation and exploration outside academic confines allowing emerging practitioners to interact with the larger creative community as well as attempt to create a network of diverse artists across mediums and disciplines. Over the years, the residency model has been constantly refined and updated to be more relevant to the times. The programme is populated with artists’ visits and interactions, studio visits, workshops, and curated exhibition walkthroughs, so the residents can have a gamut of art-related experiences and exposure. These interactions are planned according to the needs and interests of the cohort to give them a stimulating experience and insights that will help them push their practice.

This year, the Peers calendar was organised to bring together diverse lens based and printmaking art practices, drawing and new-media, language, writing, note-making, archives, diverse visual voices, ways of storytelling, and the Khirkee community.

The residency started off with a peer-to-peer sharing session where the cohort dialogued with each other and shared about their practices through presentations and conversations. This was followed by a two-day dark room printing workshop facilitated by artist Srinivas Kuruganti at his studio, offering insights into editing, design, and his collaborative process. He demonstrated how to develop pictures in a darkroom, a technique that most of the cohort were unfamiliar with, taking them through the minute decisions that one needs to make to get the desired image. The hands-on experience allowed the residents to unpack conversations around personal archives and object making while engaging with a new technique of printmaking.

With artist Srinivas Kuruganti at his studio

The second week of the residency began with a curatorial walkthrough of Of Worlds Within Worlds, a retrospective of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s artistic career by curator Aditi Ghidiyal at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts. The walkthrough familiarised the cohort with Sheikh’s practice, influences, and methodology as well as the museum’s curatorial approach. Insights about the transitions in context and visual imagery in Sheikh’s practice inspired a dialogue among the residents regarding peer-to-peer learning and how their practices can expand and respond to contemporary issues. This dialogue continued during the week when the cohort met with the awardees of the Emerging Artists Award over lunch at Khoj.

With curator Aditi Ghidiyal at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts

The Peers residents also attended a workshop on networking organized by the Serendipity Arts Foundation for their artists-in-residence with Saurabh Wasson, Director of Exhibitor Relations at India Art Fair. After this, the Serendipity cohort also visited Khoj for their monthly session of 'The Feminist Parlor' with 'The Third Eye'. The session 'What Makes Research Feminist?' reflected on how feminist thinking can shape our understanding of crime, justice, and research practice. Facilitated by Maitreyi Misra from The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR University of Law (formerly Project 39A, NLU Delhi), the session opened up creative possibilities between the rigour of litigation and mitigation, introducing care, vulnerability, and criticality as vital tools of feminist research.

This year too, Khoj organised a Khirkee and an Old Delhi walk for the residents. The purpose of these walks is to help the cohort familiarise themselves with Khirkee and Delhi – places that some of them are visiting for the first time, respectively. The Old Delhi walk was led by Ruchika Dhillon, Program Fellow at Khoj, who took the residents through the markets and equipment shops in Chawri Bazar and Chandni Chowk. The walk, which happened during the latter half of the week, covered key sights like the Khirkee Masjid, the Satpula Lake Park and the Satpula Dam, helping the cohort situate themselves in the historical but also the contemporary and unique socio-cultural fabric of the village, allowing them to place themselves and contextualise their practices in the context of Khirkee.

The third and the fourth weeks of the residency were dotted with in-person interactions with Adwait Singh, Gagan Singh, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Rahee Punyashloka. These interactive sessions encouraged the cohort to contemplate aesthetics, politics, philosophy and temporalities of listening and art making, charting a course through the archive, and reading the thematic clusters and inclinations that emerge and develop. Khoj also organised a writing workshop with Adwait Singh for the critic-in-residence Thangkhankhup Hanghal around the process of locating the self as the writer, the role of a critic, and how the writer implants themselves in contexts and in what modality the writerly gets formed based on likes/dislikes, tastes, moods, histories, triggers and languages.

In the run-up to the Open Studio Day, the cohort programmed visits to the Asia Art Archive and Alkazi Theatre Archive and attended a writing workshop with writer-programmes manager Annalisa Mansukhani at the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Arts (FICA) at their Reading Room. These visits opened processes of archiving and archives as well as writing (not limited to text or text-based forms) across artistic practice as a way of thinking about practice, process, and making. During the same week, the cohort visited Ashok Ahuja’s studio, who expanded on the ideas of visual media and research, opening up about his practice and sparking conversations about longevity and contemporary.

Throughout the residency, the Khoj space was also populated with other events that the cohort participated in, including a closed-door performance by Kaldi Moss and Cello Valenta which looked at violence, tools and power, and what it does to one.

The Peers Cohort and Their Practices

The artists this year chose to work with themes of memory, the body and the machine, urbanisms, and social commentaries using found and uncommon materials, and mediums. For the open studio days, they pushed themselves to make their studios a space of dialogue while also presenting the shifts in their practices.

Abhay Pratap Singh

Abhay is based between Santiniketan and Raigarh and is pursuing a Master's in Sculpture from Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University. His works are interdisciplinary in nature. They utilise the knowledge of science, philosophy, history, and the arts to understand the 'truth' through relations of interconnectivity. His practice is rooted in experimenting with interaction and site-specific art as a way to investigate religious polarisation, social constructs, and historical narratives within the framework of public art.

During Peers, Abhay’s practice shifted towards exploring new forms of image-making as well as immersion and participation. He experimented with gunpowder prints, thinking through how images, both real and virtual, are not only representative but can actively construct new realities.

His project 'Gunpowder Situations' focused on ideas of fiction and mythmaking in the digital age and its impact on knowledge systems. Juxtaposing the prints with a projection of fire, during the open studio day he probed the question of how a digital image can ignite real-world situations. The smell of gunpowder clung to the air as one encountered the mise-en-scène as well as two books made by photocopying a copy of an image repeatedly. Opposite corners of the room held a television with a no-network screen and a glass cube that contained smoke.

Maithili Bavkar

Maithili has a Master's in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University and is currently based in New Delhi. She works with text across various mediums like artist books, poetry, photography, and video. She is particularly interested in the multiple lives of text and how meaning shifts as it moves between forms. Her recent research explores the relationship between memory and technology, particularly the ways in which memory is externalised and how technology intersects with processes of remembering, forgetting and archiving.

For Maithili, Peers became an exploration of text and book forms and their tangibility in conjunction with memory. For the open studio day, her project 'Today is hard to remember' investigated the nexus between the body and the machine and how memory exists between them. Central to her work was the question of what it means to remember in a time of endless mediation. Using images, photobooks, and projection mapping, she reflected on the image and journal as a site to remember, record, and possibly forget. In the centre of the room was memory foam in the shape of an open notepad that invited the audience to step on it and be remembered, held.

Pratik Naik

Pratik has a Master’s in Visual Arts from the SN School of Arts and Communication, Hyderabad, and is based in Goa. He specialises in digital art, experimental video editing, animations, video installations, and multimedia installations. Personal archival material such as photographs, notes, journal entries and recorded audios are often retrospectively looked upon; every time these materials find a way to interact with different contexts and timelines and find themselves a completely new existence.

For Pratik, Peers offered him space and time to shift his focus and add spontaneity to his practice. During the residency, Pratik started exploring how sound could be a tool to claim space, assert presence, and mark territory without any physical boundary. Questions around environmental conditioning, chaos, absorption and resistance bubbled over in his project for the open studio day.

Pulling from his own experience of the residency, annotations from fellow residents, and readings by Heidegger on the panopticon phenomena, Pratik’s studio offered a glimpse into the shifts in his practice. As the audience stepped into his studio, they were greeted by a video of people engaged in a conversation. The video, which was triggered by a webcam, prompted the onlooker to stand as still as they could to be a part of the group, to observe them.

Building on the idea of reconfiguring a space, Pratik also included a worktable with videos of the city being projected on it in his studio. There were sketchbooks on the table that invited the audience to negotiate access through gestures and behaviour and drawing, adding their own thoughts and questions on it.

Ritwika Ganguly

Ritwika studied for her Master's in Painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University and is based in Vadodara. Her practice involves sketching, photo- and video-documenting and translating them into watercolour wash paintings and traditional animation. Her works reflect her experiences of people, places and the time she dwells in. Through this, she explores the way of seeing and perceiving the human mind, its association with matter and the complexity of socio-cultural conditioning in the context of visual symbols and their existence in time and space.

Peers for Ritwika was the time to explore and expand on the idea of a studio as a space. Inspired by the workshop with Srinivas, Ritwika embarked on a processual approach for her open studio. She worked on the perception of an unknown object and how the known space around it works, in her case the hands, by creating non-narrative and non-sequential storyboards. Elements of projection mapping became a part of the storyboards, adding texture to the process of finalising an element.

For Ritwika, the idea was to open up her studio as a place for dialogue, with the shift within her practice being at the centre of it. She included her journal, notes, studio table and chair, along with the final animation as part of the mise-en-scène, inviting conversations around an in-between space.

Stuti Bansal

Stuti did her MA from the Royal College of Art London along with a Diploma from Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film in Vienna. She is an independent experimental moving-image artist who is interested in light, space and movement. Her practice involves working with analogue film material, animation, and installation and performance, and she is currently interested in curating spaces for experimental film works in the hope of creating a community for collaboration. She is based between Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

During Peers, Stuti explored the camera as a medium, the urge to see images, and the joy in looking. Pushing herself to work with unfamiliar apparatuses and slow processes, Stuti made her own pinhole camera and shot pictures of Khoj, her fellow residents, and the residency. She experimented with the tactility of developing prints, light, distance, colour, and what kind of surface to project an image onto. For the open studio, instead of having her photos within her studio, she used the courtyard and the residency space to create liminal spaces within a familiar space. Inside her studio were multiple camera obscura that invited the visitors to step in, observe, and navigate the space between a screen and a lens.

Critic-in-Residence: Thangkhankhup Hanghal

Thangkhankhup is from Manipur and has studied at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is a transmedial creative practitioner, researcher, writer, and curator. He has been part of the curation and exhibition of several shows including 'Ki Tui Ton' (KTT) with Young Tribal Women’s Network at SAA (April 2025) in collaboration with artists-in-exile in solidarity and support to the March 2025 earthquake of Myanmar and the resistance against the military junta. As an academic, he has written and presented papers including 'Limlaak: A Photographic History of Lamka' and '#YouTubeNewWave' at various conferences.

During the Peers residency, Thangkhankhup explored the identity of the critic and the practice of writing. It was an interrogation into the historical categorisation of the critic as a legitimising entity. He wanted to explore the implications of the gradual destabilization of that very position held by the critic and also the assumption of writing solely as the critic's practice. Who is a critic? What does a critic do? Do we still need the critic for criticism? Can critic critique without writing? These are some of the questions that persisted throughout the residency and he tried engaging with different forms of writing to approach these questions. He also developed two blogs, 'The Critic' and 'A Quiet Bunch', for the Khoj website.

For the open studio days, Thangkhankhup developed a book in form of a code that unpacked these questions. He also collaborated with Stuti on 'Rooms as albums' by opening their living space as an influence on their work and the images they ended up making and taking.

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Cover Image: From L to R - Thangkhankhup Hanghal, Abhay Pratap Singh, Stuti Bansal, Ritwika Ganguly, Maithili Bavkar, and Pratik Naik