Artists Statements

Dhara Rivera

In - Balancing
On my first days in Delhi I started taking snapshots of things that one way or another got my attention; some by being rather unknown to me; others that, in strange ways, touched the already known. These visual explorations began to produce clues to what could be a starting point from which to develop some work during my residency period.
From all the images gathered, it was the ones pertaining to the scaffoldings used in construction sites that stayed with me. Their fragility; the precariousness of the structures upon which workers built, the acts of balance performed on them to scale enormous contemporary structures were a source of fascination and were to become the conceptual base of the piece to be.
Most of the images were taken around my ‘new neighborhood’. I cut out most of the solid wall parts of the photographs and left the scaffolding, the cables and the figures. The manner in which they are presented try to reproduce the position from which they were taken and the position of the workers that balance their lives on them.

Maneul Bouzo

I act on the world of memories. I travel everywhere with that trunk half-full. And wherever I go, I empty part of it out and fill it up again. And the earlier memories and the later ones join and mix. One’s life experiences from a puzzle and as Georges Perec noted in Life instructions for use’, “only those pieces that have been joined together will become legible, will make sense”.In his trunk the solitary sailor keeps a fragment of a letter that he never sent, an orphaned missive, trapped in limbo, with no address nor addressee, a slice of life and thought that never, until now, had found its place. It reads: “...bits (of fragments), must be try to be one again, or more whole, to gradually collect the remains, and gradually slick them together like a puzzle that we recompose again and again. Whenever I’ve tried to do puzzles, the pieces trick me and I fit some in places that are not theirs, (seems something symbolic with respect to my life) and I’ve never manage to finish a single one. It must be that all discipline bores me. What I’ve noticed is that all the puzzles I’ve seen were already missing a piece. I don’t know whether they come like that from the factory in order to surround them with that mystery of the unfinished of whether children, pet, and our own clumsiness deprive us of the pieces and, thus, we can only manage a portrait that’s approximate but full.....”
Because each person, and every work of art, is a sort of patchwork composed of scraps of diverse experiences and memories gathered and sewn together to form a whole, a recombined and renovated whole that keeps growing and evolving in a modern, more modest and realistic version of the classic metaphor of the life of each individual as a tapestry gradually being woven.

Matev Gavula

My intention during the course of the residency was to:
- Create organic structures placed on sheets of glass, structures found in chaos and coincidence
- Show empty places for brand new feelings
- Make prints and reminders
- Build connections between two spaces and explore the possibilities of both day light and artificial light
- Observe processes of melting, flowing and solidification
- Picture softness and liquidity in unfinished situations transform into finished objects
- Create an installation which is influenced by both processes, painting when colour is used as a substance and sculpturing
My work was inspired by:
• The architecture of the Khoj building, by its genius loci
- Used materials, silicon sealant and flat glass
- Colourless spaces, by their particular ambience
- Transparent plastic macs
- Lizards, by their close and silent presence, graceful motions and archaic look

Prashant Soni

To-let, one room
Sarais-inns or lodges were built by the Mughals for travellers to take shelter in and find companionship for a little while on their long journeys. Today the Sarai structures have disappeared but the places where they once existed still bear the names as a reminder of the past e.g. Ber Sarai,Jia Sarai, Sarai Rohilla .
I visited some of these Sarais and photographed the people living there.
Dealing with the idea of absences and presences, I drew these faces on the walls of my Sarai, i.e. the Khoj Studio and put a thin coat of paint over them so that they receded into the walls. Like the Sarais these faces were absent yet present on the walls.