PEERS 2021: Dispatch #1
Entry-points to the virtual residency
It is late August, seasons are turning, and we are lugging onto the later half the year. Still grappling with the unsettling devastation of the Covid-19 epidemic and the consequent state of deferral it has funnelled us in, Khoj’s student residency Peers, returned after its suspension in 2020. This year the residency takes place online, as our cohort of six artists–Jayeeta Chatterjee, Pahul Singh, Salman Bashir, Sandeep TK, Shubham Kumar, and Srinivas Harivanam–and critic(me), inhabit a shared microcosm. This dispatch, first in a series of eight, is an exercise in documenting and thinking through this edition of the residency.
At a remove from each other in different cities across the country, we are certainly not in residence together. One of the most promising things about a residency perhaps, is the way in which it can be a brief interregnum from life–an opportunity to drift away from one’s daily rigours and incubate one’s own creative practice in dialogue with others. Even as we meet online and share our work, there is an undeniable dissociative pulse in place. Immersion is not the guiding principle here, neither is there a strong sense of location calibrating us. In previous iterations of Peers, Khoj’s studio in Khirkee has been a generative site for discussion, programming, and projects; but for most of us the site remains as spectral as we are to each other. With the residency remodelled for our digitally attuned present, the problems and provocations that we contend with splinter off from a singular issue at center: how can our practice really be hewn out with each other? The tangle surrounding this question is dense, as much with faith as with doubt, about virtuality–while in some cases it is the material base of practice, in other cases the issue of digital efficacy cuts through. With its correlative forms such as the virtual exhibition, the viewing room, the online panel; the virtual residency’s togetherness is inflected by the dramaturgy of the internet. And this precisely directs one straight to the elemental question of the materiality of one’s practice. What art do you make when you are in residency online? Is ‘the digital’ a virtually transplanted circuit that an artist has to negotiate simply by preparing digital/digitized versions of their work? Is it a tool that ameliorates one’s practice? Is the only meaningful way to be looped into digitality only by using it as a ‘medium’? And what does the digital medium mean in relation to reality, when the relationship between the real/virtual is increasingly symbiotic and not oppositional?
I sum up a few of the residency’s distinctions to underline the salience of this undertaking. The challenge of the residency this year is not simply restricted to creating and showcasing artworks, for it foundationally arranges our little cohort in-line with most gnawing issues of reality/virtuality. It is a question that remains unavoidable and persistent, as we are reminded of while meeting over Zoom and Topia, sharing google drive folders, working through logistics of time and scheduling, through power outages, internet clampdowns, and device failures.
This series of dispatches, however documentary, will aspire towards maintaining a state of translucence as opposed to transparency, an expectation that subtends practices of documentation and criticism. This is not a writerly gesture inching towards a conscious befuddlement of language, but a commitment towards not resolving the knots single-handedly in the text, as an additive and external extension of the practice. As I proceed to document the course of this residency, I hope to make apparent the labour of our diffused cohabitation as well as offer this translucent account of the artist’s intellectual and creative labour.