Interview: We need new breed of philanthropists, says Pooja Sood of Khoj Studios
Pooja Sood speaks to HT as Peers Residency, a programme run by the artist-led organisation Khoj Studios, completes 20 years
On Diwali night in November 1997, 12 Indian artists including Anita Dube, Manisha Parekh, Subodh Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty and Ajay Desai, and 10 international artists from Kenya, Namibia, Cuba, UK, Austria and closer home, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, held a workshop in Modinagar, located on the outskirts of Delhi. They aimed to open dialogue among practitioners across the subcontinent, Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific, to assist each other’s processes of cultural empowerment, and to tilt the arts discourse away from its Euro-American centrism.

What emerged from this was the Khoj International Artists’ Association — an independent not-for-profit organisation — that over the course of the decades, built and supported artists’ networks not only in India but also in the larger South Asia region and beyond. As the international residencies for more established artists continued, they also started a programme for students of art called Peers Residency in 2003. Each year, a small cohort of students would be given a month-long residency at Khoj — which had moved to a place in Khirkee, Delhi by now — where they would be allowed “room to experiment, room to fail” and develop their practice, as director and founder Pooja Sood put it.
As this residency completes 20 years (they missed a year during Covid), HT speaks to Sood about the impact that the students’ residency has had in the contemporary art scene, and why Khoj Studios is always in a state of precarity. Edited excerpts:
How do you measure the impact of the residency that has now completed 20 years? Are you looking back at these two decades and consolidating some of the big lessons that you’ve learnt, drawing from what has happened? And what is hope for the future?
This is a very momentous time for us. When we started [Peers], several of our board members felt that they had to do something for young artists who had graduated but were struggling because they were taught a particular way at college, which was often a very conservative, skill-based learning, and when they went out into the world, people were always looking for something else from them. That in-between space. That’s what we wanted to fill. And we’ve always put the artist at the centre of everything. So, can we get them to meet senior artists or a more established artist? Do they want us to talk to them when they put out a proposition? Can we bring them a mentor who can see you through this?
We were keen to support artists who have an interesting practice and allow them the possibility of really pushing that practice, even if it meant its failure. You know, allowing for failure to happen. Now, that’s not the most exciting way to measure impact. But it’s about providing that space so an artist can feel confident, really think through their practice first.
And of course, it’s lovely to see artists fly, and keep doing what we would call radical, critical work, regardless of the gallery network. It’s great if they are recognised and now more and more galleries and museums are happy to take more experimental work. It’s really fantastic to see some of the work which was seen as experimental say 20 years ago and no gallery would look at it now being foregrounded in galleries.
[Even today] we send out physical posters to every college. We have a list of some 100 art colleges across India. We ask the principals to put them up and let the students who’re finishing their MFA know that this is an opportunity for them. And now we receive 300 applications which we whittle down and then an external jury selects four or five artists.
We eventually started the Peers Share parallel program for the many who were on our waitlist. So we give them a small amount of money to come to Delhi and they can bring their pieces of work and spend a day some time with senior artists and curators who would engage with their work. This critical feedback is what sometimes artists desperately want, but are scared to ask because it’s often given in ways that are quite destructive.
Tell us about the economics of running a residency. How do you keep a residency programme begun in 2003 going in 2025? I’m sure the economics of it would be vastly different today?
There are hundreds of residences now. Many of them give much better production money. They have much better facilities. I mean, we have a few empty rooms, and a small corpus of funds but we do have a vast network to help artists get what they need. Also, I think the fact that we’re located where we are, in Khirkee, allows for a certain kind of immersion, that gives one no choice but to engage with the local, and acknowledge your privilege or lack of it.
As an institution, we allow ourselves to take risks just as we ask artists to take risks, right? So for example, some years ago, we started gaming residencies for artists, and I remember there was some resistance within my team who felt that’s not art. But I persisted and because there are so many artists doing socially engaged practice, what if they could think of their process through a game instead of say, a book or a video or a film? I mean, what fun. And so we took that chance and it flew. I mean, three years later, we have the artists who have been doing board games and video games.
So we have taken those leaps of faith, so to speak. For a few years, we tried to organise the workshop around the theme of art and fashion but it didn’t work out, and we realised that maybe we didn’t understand fashion in a way that was conducive to art making. We did two residences, Kalol Dutta attended one of them. He came to us as a fashion designer, and now he’s being represented by Experimenter, the Kolkata gallery.
So these are, for us, success stories where just a single impetus has changed the course of someone’s art making. When it comes to the economics [of running this place], of course, when we started out, we would give the kids ₹5,000 and we worked on a ₹15,000 - ₹20,000 budget. Over the years, the production budget has become more. My curators always fight with me about it, but I argue that sometimes even less money can help artists learn to be innovative. People have worked with nothing..
You know you have to be able to buy your paint and you have to be able to pay your welder, but we don’t have to match market rates. And we can’t match because we’re not a commercial enterprise, or have huge infrastructure. What we do have is a real commitment to artists, and we can use all our physical, intellectual, networks to get them what they need. We once even arranged for a warm goat lung for an artist once.
Does Khoj Studios still face a struggle to keep going?
Khoj struggles. We move from precarity to precarity. We might find funding for a few years, and then after that, we don’t know. And this continues. Precarity comes from two things. One is of course just money. We’ve always had funding from international bodies, but that is getting more and more difficult because they don’t have the money [their governments have slashed budgets] and because it’s more difficult to access international money given the current rules around Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). And when you come to India, there are very few people who are interested in supporting the arts. Philanthropy for the arts is next to zero.Philanthropy exists, but it’s for health, education, religion. Understandably so, because civil society needs all of that, but culture is as important because that’s what creates cohesion, a social fabric, and gives you joy.
There’s a precarity built into the system and in the not-for-profit sector, or collectives space, who are doing the grassroots work of supporting the artists. I’m not just talking about us. We’re still better off than many smaller collectives or NGOs.
So what we need is a new breed of philanthropists who understand that culture is important and who support not just the blockbusters, but also the many small white elephants in the room.
