The body in the gallery

Subodh Gupta showering in cowdung in a purification ritual, Nikhil Chopra using his body as a work of art, Anita Dube carving up flesh...Some of Indian art's landmark moments can be traced back to a shack studio in Delhi's then chaotic and now posh Khirkee village where Khoj was born in 1997.An artistled initiative, it became an incubator for experimental art and ideas, also providing the first platform for performance art. "It was challenging. We were working in a new territory," says Pooja Sood, one of the co-founders of the collective. A decade later, Sood looks back at some milestones, and picks out five for us.He is one of the most interesting performance artists inIndia today, excavating memory and history though a new genre calledperformative practice. Take for instance, his photo-performance Walk to OldDelhi. Dressed in glittering royal regalia, the fictitious character Sir RajaIII, winds his way through the narrow streets of Old Delhi towards an Urduprinting press. Over many conversations with the old owner of the press AsifFehmi, he unearths the hoary past of the Din Duniya House, which houses thepress, and which was supposedly built for a truant daughter, and her tutorlover, by a nawab. The press is also notorious for having printed undergroundmaterial for the 1857 Uprising. As the crowds look on nonplussed, Sir Raja IIIprints leaflets on the history of the press, hands them out and leaves insilence. A ghost-relic from a colonial past, he leaves behind a memorypalimpsest - and many unanswered questions. In the guise of his alter ego SirRaja, Chopra also asks us to grasp the complexity of his photo-performance - ofthe self on display while enacting another.While Chopra's workboldly questions the boundaries between the mediums of drawing, photography,theatre and live art, it is live performance that is central to his practice. AsYog Raj Chitrakar, a character which made its debut in a Khoj residency andsubsequently travelled to Kashmir, his actions include the mundane actions ofeveryday life: bathing, eating, drinking, sleeping and shaving, along with morecreative functions such as drawing in charcoal and chalk. The spectacle unfoldsin the ritualistic details embedded in these actions. What goes ordinarilyunnoticed, if caught, becomes a heightened moment of revelation, mirroring ourvery own private and social anxieties.Chopra, who lives in Mumbai, has since resurrected the character of Yog Raj in performances at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and performed to acclaim at Art Basel last month.In 2005,Anita Dube's landmark performance, Keywords, created a context in which performativity, critical textual discourse and the histories of the avant-garde were brought to the fore. She used a delicate scalpel to carve provocative words out of buffalo meat. The carved words called for a debate on issues related to art history ('avant-garde') and the transgression of gender and social mores ('prison', 'sexual love').The videos sensuously capture the sweating ice slabs, the inert meat and the bowl of rose petals in which the artist washes her hands like Lady Macbeth.One of Subodh Gupta's key works was done at a Khoj workshopin 1997.This proved in fact to be a turning point in his artistic vocabulary andjourney. He built a circular enclosure with cowdung bricks, a material that iscommonly used in rural India. In doing this, he referred to his own roots inrural Bihar, invoking his experiences growing up as a child in a contextentirely different from the metros where the field of art is played out. Themonument at once acted as an edifice and a memorial, an elevation of commonplacematerial and histories which were then transformed into an art object that couldbe experienced tangibly through the senses of smell, touch andsight.In 1999,Gupta continued to experiment with local material,this time in a performative mode. He made a paste of mud and cowdung and smearedhis body with it and lay down in the sun on a patch of earth covered withcowdung. This performance was later recalled in Pure, a video work in whichGupta played with ideas of purity and pollution and metaphors that invoked hisrural roots that were now re-contextualised in an urbancontext.When Cuban artist Tania Bruguera participated in the Khojworkshop in 2001 she was surprised at the use (and waste) of the ubiquitousteabag which all the artists used /wasted/ discarded after their multiple cupsof tea through the day. She began to collect these teabags and made a cloak outof them and used it in a performance. A few years later she went on to develop alarge conceptual work with used teabags at the VeniceBiennale.When Song Dong, an artist from mainland China, first came toDelhi in 1999 he spoke English with the help of a translation device. He usedthe lack of the spoken word as a conceptual basis for his daily silentperformance against a wall in Modinagar. Developing on the notion ofcommunicating through "silence" as did the early Indian Buddhist monks whotravelled to China many centuries ago, Song Dong's performance was a gesture ofreciprocity that tried to dwell on the meaning of silence as a mode ofcommunication.