New Delhi, Jan 30 (PTI) A new exhibition, featuring works by national and international contemporary artists, brings into focus the increasingly porous boundaries between bodies, machines, and public space,
and interrogates how technology reshapes identity, intimacy, and everyday life.
The exhibition, titled “Are You Human?: Bodies-Machines-Publics” by Khoj International Artists’ Association, opened on Friday at DLF Avenue Mall and Khoj Studios in Saket.
The exhibition is accompanied by ‘Notes from the Digital Underground: Bodies-Machines-Publics’, a two-day symposium conceptualised by Khoj with Mila T Samdub, scheduled for January 31 – February 1 at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan.
Together, the exhibition and symposium bring into focus over a decade of Khoj’s inquiry into art, technology, digitality, and embodied experience. “Over the last three decades, Khoj has consistently responded to moments of social change through artistic practice-especially at the intersections of gender, ecology, and technology. Our upcoming exhibition and symposium has grown out of the long-standing inquiry of our hyper-digital lives, where the boundaries between the physical and the virtual continue to blur, especially with developments like AI, deepfakes, and immersive media,” Pooja Sood, director, Khoj International Artists’ Association, said in a statement.
Rather than seeing the body and the machine as separate entities in conflict or control, the exhibition creates space to approach them connectedly.
Works by 17 artists and collaborators explore how bodies become sites of data production, how interfaces encode bias, and how public spaces are increasingly determined by invisible systems of extraction and automation.
“‘Are you Human?’ is an inquiry which has emerged from the urgency to understand how evolving technologies transform and reorganise what it means to be human, to inhabit gender, caste and other socio-ecological formations, in the 2020s and beyond, globally,” the organisers said.
The participating artists and collaborators include Anisha Baid (India), Ars Electronica Animation on Tour (Austria), Ben Andrews & Emma Roberts (Australia), Dimension Plus (Taiwan), Elsewhere in India (India), Hasan Shahurukh (India), IIT Kanpur HIVE Lab (India), Leewardists (India), and Manuel Beltrán & Nayantara Ranganathan (India).
The symposium aims to study, unstitch, and refract the digital in the radically uneven geography of contemporary India with conversations on themes of “The Insensibility of Our Infrastructures”, “Affective Terrains”, “In the time of gig work…”, and “A Future Digital”.
“Our challenge is to articulate the contradictions and possibilities of this internet, equipping artists, technologists, activists and scholars to collectively respond to the urgencies of our digital present. Inviting input from across the world but centring India, we want to render a situated view on networked computing that can illuminate all internets everywhere. How to make sensible the vast spectrum of this digitality so we can imagine, prototype and fight for ways of living otherwise?,” the said.
The symposium brings together a mix of established speakers from both international and Indian contexts to engage with the project’s themes.
The exhibition at DLF Avenue Mall will come to an end on February 10 and will continue at Khoj Studios till February 28. PTI MAH MAH MAH
