In her Khoj

Khoj, an oasis of non-commercial art experimentation in a sector dominated by galleries and auction houses, has played a huge role in helping Indian contemporary art become what it is today — vibrant, diverse, popular, commercially successful and globally acknowledged. And the one person who has been at the centre of it all – curating shows, handholding artists, ironing out administrative niggles – is Pooja Sood, founding member and director of Khoj.

A mathematics graduate and MBA, Sood came to art quite late, and more by chance than design. She got married and moved to Chandigarh where, with two children aged three and one, she enrolled for an MA in art history at Punjab University. “I’d never heard of it. But it was beautiful timing – 9.15 am-1.15 pm – and manning it was Prof BN Goswamy. Joining the programme was the best decision of my life. I was studying for the joy of it. I didn’t know where it was taking me,” she reminisces today.

Chance intervened again when, at the end of her course, her husband moved to Delhi where the art scene – it was around 1994 – was starting to heat up. Vikram Lal of Eicher Motors (makers of Royal Enfield motorbikes) had opened a gallery and recruited Sood to manage it. And so Sood, whose course in art history had ended with turn of the century Indian art, had to learn hands-on the intricacies of putting up an art show. “How do you do a card?

How do you print it? What paper? I knew nothing,” she laughs. Those first years, she says, she curated a show of Amitava Das, and one or two others. “But I got bored. ‘Why am I doing this?’ I asked myself. Could I curate different shows? Ask different questions, in different mediums?” 

Thankfully, Lal was supportive. And so began Sood’s experiments with the range of art production happening in India, art that went beyond painting and sculpture. Sood began with ceramics, holding a series of shows by Gurcharan Singh, founder of Delhi Blue Pottery, Ray Meeker, et al. Next came a show of calendar art by Patricia Uberoi; another of women artists – Sheeba Chachi, Anita Dube, Manisha Parekh and Bharti Kher, who showed a painting; and along with it a cassette playing the whistle of a pressure cooker. In 1997, to mark the 50th anniversary of India’s Independence, she put up a joint show of Indian and Pakistani contemporary artists – Sylvat Aziz, Risham Syed and Iftikhar Dadi from across the border, while the local artists were Nalini Malani, Sheeba Chachi and Prithpal Ladi.

The germs of Sood’s wide-ranging interests and cross-border outlook that are markers of the Khoj programming, can be discerned early. The Pakistan connection was also her first foray into forging a cross-border artistic collaboration, resulting in the South Asian Network for the Arts in 2000, a fruitful alliance between non-commercial art spaces in countries across the region that has resulted in artists from the region travelling, making art, showing and selling freely across borders.

Looking back, Sood says, “I think my biggest learning was Khoj. Some amazing artists have passed through Khoj and you’re always surrounded by interesting, mad ideas.” And while some people who visit Khoj may continue to consider many of the works there as mad, Sood says that just the act of showing them has helped create an audience, and nuance their appreciation for contemporary art. She recounts how, at the first show of video works by Nalini Malani, the audience was unsure of whether they should walk or sit, and whether this was theatre. Later, many would come up and say what crap!

“It’s a journey. When we started, we used to get backhanded compliments like the Delhi College of Art telling students don’t do Khoj kind of work. Today, the practice – installations, site specific work, something a little radical – has become pretty mainstream. When we started, performance art was not happening. At Khoj, we take as many risks as we invite our artists to.”