khoj international residency august-september 2026

Khoj invites applications from artists whose practice engages with mental health and distress, critically examining how pain—physical, psychological, or historical—shapes both the self and society. How is suffering unequally distributed across race, caste, class, gender, and geography? How do individuals and communities navigate, resist, or reclaim forms of vitality in the face of war, colonial legacies, and systemic inequalities? Rather than defining mental health and illness solely in medical terms, we are open to a range of knowledge systems, forms of practice, and diverse concepts of vitality and distress.

This residency seeks to open up spaces for explorations of clinical and everyday experiences, as well as forms of myth and ritual as alternative or mainstream ways to understand and process pain. Ancestors, spirits, oral histories, and expressive traditions have long functioned as tools of healing. At the same time, digital cultures, new technologies, and clinical subjectivities are significantly reshaping ideas of the self, and influencing experiences of anxiety, coping, memory and aspiration. Bringing together artists and scholars from India and the UK, this residency seeks to explore varied forms of vitality and distress that shape contemporary life-worlds