International Workshop 2005 - Mumbai

Arriving at the Jindal Vijaynagar Steel Ltd. factory at Vasind, 70 km from Mumbai, 22 local and international artists rested their tired feet at the guesthouse: the site of the Khoj International Artists Workshop this year. The participating artists had already broken the ice during an occasionally overwhelming but very stimulating two-day journey through Mumbai's colonial and post-industrial landscapes.

The critic-in-residence, Nancy Adajania, observes: I encountered many moments of discovery: discourses were cheerfully derailed because we spoke across languages; the personal impacted the theoretical; differences in cultural and art-historical time-lines made us readjust our understanding of medium, genre, the aesthetic and the political. Dodging the slippages and misunderstandings, we celebrated quiet friendship and genuine affection, only to return to noisy argument! Unforeseen emotional dangers and cultural insecurities were written into our script.

One could not have expected otherwise, of such a diverse group. Among the Indians were Sunil Gawde, Riyas Komu, Krishnamachari Bose, Sudarshan Shetty and Prajakta Potnis (Mumbai); Sarnath Banerjee (Delhi), Paula Sengupta (Kolkata); Ayisha Abraham, Anup Mathew Thomas, Kiran Subbaiah, Suresh Kumar (Bangalore); Raghunath (Kochi). Among the foreign participants were Shulekha Chaudhury (Bangladesh), Mariam Suhail (Pakistan), Somapala Pothupitiya (Sri Lanka), Tracey Rose (South Africa), Ligyung (South Korea), Shezad Dawood (UK), Gilbert Caty (France), Parastou Forouhar (Germany), Annalee Davis (Barbados) and Deniz Gul (Turkey). In such a scenario, identitarian politics was thankfully not enacted through the cliche's of victimology. Rather, subject positions were inverted or even invented to problematise issues of race, gender, caste and class.