India, Feb. 3 -- On Diwali night in November 1997, 12 Indian artists including Anita Dube, Manisha Parekh, Subodh Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty and Ajay Desai, and 10 international artists from Kenya, Namibia, Cuba, UK, Austria and closer home, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, held a workshop in Modinagar, located on the outskirts of Delhi. They aimed to open dialogue among practitioners across the subcontinent, Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific, to assist each other's processes of cultural empowerment, and to tilt the arts discourse away from its Euro-American centrism.

What emerged from this was the Khoj International Artists' Association - an independent not-for-profit organisation - that over the course of the decades, built and supported...