Villa Swagatam - French Institute in India

Residency brief

Khoj is an autonomous not-for-profit contemporary arts organization established in 1997. Through international, on-site, off-site and often hyperlocal programmes and residencies, Khoj supports and incubates experimental and transdisciplinary creative practices that look at art and its various intersections with other disciplines, such as gender, urbanisms, ecology, and technology. The residency at Khoj provides time and space to the artists to engage, respond, and present their work in a historical socio-economic context, allowing for inclusivity, participation, and artistic interventions, in small but palpable ways. The residency acts as a platform for dialogue, supporting the development of personal artistic practices while building a network of interdisciplinary artists.

Khoj International Residency will welcome one French resident to explore and expand discourse in the field of craft, design and technology through innovative artistic inquiry. Craft or crafting refers to the ways in which an object comes to form. Materiality, skill, repetition, tradition and historicity are core considerations in the process of crafting an object. Sharing histories with craft-based knowledge, design discourse lends function and intention to objects, systems and environments. Technology – through evolution of tools, machines and digital technology – has played a significant role in the evolution of craft and design, making new contexts and inspiring new innovations. Through this residency, Khoj wishes to host critical artistic practices that situate the interweaving of craft and design in an ever-changing technological milieu.

Our Space

Khirki Extension, New Delhi (Delhi)

The Khirki neighbourhood, a dense urban village settlement in the heart of the city, was formerly an agricultural farmland, with a history dating back to the 13th century. Today, Khirki is a melting pot of cultures, with small-time entrepreneurs, labour-based workers, sweatshop workers, artists, migrants and refugees from Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Ivory Coast. Artists who are residents at Khoj Studios inevitably begin to respond to this immediate geopolitical context of the Khoj neighbourhood.

Khoj Studios includes exhibition spaces, artists’ studios, residents’ accommodation, a reference library, a media lab, a public cafe, an open-air terrace and an additional multi-purpose space that can be used for film screenings and presentations.

Our Laureates

Jeanne Berbinau Aubry Plastician

I’d like to develop an in-situ proposal, taking roots in the richness of possibilities offered by the variety of locally sourced materials. The idea would be to learn then divert Indian embroidery technics and aesthetic in order to realize an electric alimentation system composed of of numerous little light sources.

Jeanne Berbinau Aubry is developing an experimental work in sculpture and installation, in which the study of matter and its distortions plays a fundamental role. She graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice in 2015, and a year later she became a member of La Station, an artist-run space housed in the city of Nice's former abattoirs. At the same time, she has taken part in several residency programmes, including the Villa Medicis in Rome (2016), the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2019), and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Since 2015, her artistic research has been supported by public and private institutions such as the Fondation Bernar Venet, the Université Côte d'Azur, the Fondation Fiminco and the Île-de-France Region. Her work has been presented at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson in Nice, the Friche de la Belle de Mai in Marseille, the Bubenberg Gallery and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, as well as in India, Italy and Belgium