The India of the 90s was a different place—without high-speed internet, mobile phones, and hyper-connectivity, both physical and digital. Much like today, the socio-political and economic conditions in the early 90s were unstable. The markets were slowly opening up with the onset of liberalisation in 1991, but international mobility was limited, and the economy was struggling to pick up pace. India felt isolated and acutely aware of its ‘third-world status’ in this postcolonial period.

As the Indian economy grew and technological developments took the world by surprise, new opportunities developed. Shedding its ‘third world’ status, India found its footing as a prominent player in the newly globalised world. But the Indian arts and culture landscape was still growing with few independent spaces outside the market. Those that existed had meagre resources to sustain their work, moving from one funding cycle to the other. Funding for the arts was not a priority, especially in a country like India, which was plagued with other pressing issues.

Conditions across South Asia were not dissimilar to those affecting India. While difficult to imagine now, the pre-digital era, with visa barriers and limited ability to travel created looming uncertainty about transcultural connections in the region. Among artists and literary figures, it fuelled an eagerness to respond critically to the intertwined histories of migration, trade, borders, memory and identity through their work.

What emerged in this moment of redefinition and flux was the idea of Khoj—as a gift of possibility from Robert Loder, the founder of the Triangle Arts Trust—an organisation intended to function as an arts laboratory that would gather artists from across India, the subcontinent and the globe to work together. When Khoj began in 1997, it started as a workshop to experiment with what an artist-led space could be. This was made tangible by the gathering of 24 artists, half local, half international, for its first workshop in Modinagar (India). The international workshop model continued for five years as Khoj tapped into Triangle’s vast networks in Africa, Cuba and Europe. At a time when artists in India felt unsupported and disconnected, the Khoj workshops provided a generation of contemporary art practitioners with innumerable possibilities for exchange and international network building.

Keen to deepen its connections with its immediate neighbours, Khoj started mining the region to draw out artists from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Khoj’s engagements with South Asia have been its most distinguishing feature, especially in the early 2000s. Extending its ethos of building solidarity and recognising the lack of robust artist networks within the region, Khoj’s early phase marked the emergence of its transregional curatorial practice. This took shape through residencies, exchanges, pedagogical initiatives, and the sharing of archives, all of which collectively constituted a living infrastructure of collaboration. Such practices redefined curatorial methodologies, imagining exhibitions as an outcome of long-term artistic inquiries and as spaces of gathering and sharing, moving beyond a purely aesthetic function.

As the art scene in South Asia started expanding, a shift was also coming about in the forms of art that artists engaged with. Turning to installation-based work, new media, and performance art, while highlighting themes of gender, violence, identity, displacement and body politics, several artists were making their mark internationally. Realising that knowledge production needed to be situated, plural, and attentive to local histories, artists felt the need to organise themselves to strengthen the visual arts network, and extend their connections to the majority world. 

Paradoxically, the countries closest to India geographically were most distant politically. Surmounting bureaucratic obstacles and communication lapses, Khoj attempted to remedy this disconnection and initiated the South Asia Network for the Arts (SANA) in 2001—an act of geographical solidarity beyond political maps. SANA was initiated to nourish collegiality and encourage mobility and peer-support among cultural practitioners through the creation of similar spaces in the region—Vasl in Pakistan, Britto Arts Trust in Bangladesh, Teertha in Sri Lanka and Sutra in Nepal. For Khoj, the sharing of resources as a curatorial methodology meant sharing survival strategies where one learnt from the other’s experiences and challenges.

SANA offered alternative frameworks that supported contemporary art, not dominated by commercial galleries or national institutions, especially in countries or contexts where emerging art practices were marginalised. The network recognised the need for artist-led spaces and cross-border collaboration for the growth of contemporary art practice. The transregional methodology of SANA was sensitive to the fact that many of the participating countries shared contested histories—border conflicts, migration, post-colonial legacies, and cultural overlaps. It also acknowledged that volatile and eruptive geopolitics and developmental anomalies across South Asia meant that the experiences of the groups within SANA had similar bearings.

To mark its ten years, Khoj curated Six Degrees of Separation: Chaos, Congruence and Collaboration (2008), an exhibition celebrating its role in interweaving the South Asian art landscape through the network. In her essay for Six Degrees of Separation, Kavita Singh remarked,

The exhibition’s title was meant to evoke the common saying that every person on the planet is linked to every other person by a chain of at most six individuals. In the case of South Asia, one might ironically invert the suggestion: from those who live nearest to us, and with whom we share so much, we are not linked but are separated by six degrees.¹

When Indian artist Shilpa Gupta met Pakistani artist Huma Mulji at the Khoj workshop in 1998, a special kind of friendship germinated in a particularly fraught period for both countries. Their friendship led to an itinerant partnership sustained through emails and parcels, which resulted in Aar-Paar (literally translating to on either side)—a collaborative public art exchange. Each year, both artists made works for a public space in each other’s country. The Aar Paar wall in Six Degrees of Separation showed a series of images from Aar Paar 2 (2002), which artists had emailed each other to print as posters to be put up on city walls, tea stalls, and barber shops in Mumbai and Karachi as an act against national barriers. Idealistic, critical, amusing, and cynical, the posters exhibited vociferous political slogans and subtle humorous undertones. More than the images, what left an impact was the keenness of the participating artists to move across borders. 

These serendipitous outcomes occurring at the interstices and folds of such encounters, catalysed by Khoj, inform its curatorial ethos to this day. Khoj’s thematics are a result of its commitment to respond to urgent issues, and those that affect not just India but are also reflected across cartographies. Saraab’s poetic, immersive installation, Safarnama at Khoj, as part of Does the Blue Sky Lie?, was an embodied experience of textures and toxicities of air through the experiences of jinns that traverse across landscapes affected by extractive infrastructure. For 28 Degrees North and Parallel Weathers, art practitioners Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani, Atul Bhalla, Mithu Sen and Raqs Media Collective led expeditions in areas adjacent to the 28th Parallel (through Mount Everest, the North Indian Himalayas, Rajasthan, and the Sindh Desert in Pakistan), to share weather reports that counter-mapped the terrain with localised, embodied experience and knowledge—underscoring that wind, water and weather transcend borders. Such instances highlight that curatorial propositions at Khoj have always been a key modality, inviting artists to work together to find solidarities with each other as a shared response to the times.

Khoj’s curatorial methodology has experimented with different frameworks beyond exhibitions, residencies and workshops. Committed to a transcultural/transnational spectrum of ideologies and art practices, Khoj hosted Asia Assemble in 2017—a three-day gathering of artists, curators, academics and cultural theorists from across Asia, including participants from West Asia, South Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia. Asia Assemble provided a platform to share challenges, explore connections, discuss strategies and exchange ideas to speculate on new frameworks for the region, collectively asking,

What would the future of the arts look like in Asia?

In 2011, when Khoj invited Hans Ulrich Obrist to host the first interview marathon of the region in Delhi, the India Art Fair was in its third year. The marathon was envisioned as a site of reflection that can help audiences engage with the parallel art ecologies that exist alongside the commercial space of the Art Fair. Observing the rapidly growing marketplace, as opposed to biennales and public art festivals, curator and art critic Geeta Kapur commented in her interview,

the attempt to intervene, to transform, and to radicalise the state infrastructure seems to be a lost battle...so, the fact is that instead of an institutional structure that we failed to establish, we have, in three years, established an extremely vibrant Art Fair reflecting the art market, which is engaging artists and consumers as well as international curators and collectors more than anything else that has ever preceded it. So, we are creating both an infrastructure of an art market and a phenomenology of looking at art, when in fact no other institutions in art have been able to create any kind of contemplative or reflective relationship, either of looking or of pedagogy or outreach and publics.²

Geeta’s lamentation was a deep and prescient observation of how the market would dictate the trajectory of the Indian arts ecosystem. Having said that, the last two decades have seen a surge in art spaces across South Asia, outside commercial and state-led entities. The beginning of Chobi Mela (2000) in Bangladesh, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2012) in India, The Dhaka Art Summit (2012) in Bangladesh, Colomboscope (2013) in Sri Lanka, the Photo Kathmandu Festival (2015), Serendipity Arts Festival (2015) and the Kathmandu Triennale (2017) in Nepal stand testament to the need for more of such spaces as crucial sites of curatorial thinking and discourse building in the region. This has also underscored the need that curating in South Asia requires its own vocabulary away from Western and Eurocentric constructs—one responsive to local conditions of informality and precarity in a rapidly transforming socio-cultural landscape.

Fifteen years after the interview marathon, small, autonomous spaces showcasing radical forms of art, pedagogical initiatives and discursive encounters remain scant due to the lack of funding. Yet, there have been efforts, and micro-solidarities to make room for parallel artist projects and critical interventions that foreground urgent thematics. Experiencing a moment of visibility and growth, international auction houses are reporting record-breaking sales for Indian art. This boom has not necessarily contributed to the growth or sustenance of the independent and not-for-profit sector in India.

Twenty-four years since the start of SANA, the region has returned to a more volatile phase, shaped by increasing political instability, growing cross-border tensions, and intensified corporatisation and censorship of cultural expression. Evolving technologies have made virtual connection and communication easier, but have also highlighted the absence of robust organisational networks capable of reimagining curatorial modalities, at a moment when such exchanges are more crucial than ever.

Khoj’s recent exhibition Are You Human? (2026)—with works from India, Taiwan, Australia, Netherlands, Austria, United Kingdom and Germany—emerged from the urgency to understand how evolving technologies are transforming and reorganising what it means to be human, in the 2020s and beyond, globally. In a moment when truth is unstable and realities are increasingly manufactured, what becomes of societies? How will technology reconfigure relations between centres and peripheries in the future?

What remains clear is the continued need for collective effort. Building resilient networks, supporting independent spaces, and fostering transregional dialogue will be central to shaping the next chapter of the arts in South Asia. For us at Khoj, finding ways of building solidarities, especially in the majority-world, remains as important as ever, forming the core ethos of the curatorial dialogue we continue to adopt.