Are You Human? and Notes from the Digital Underground by Khoj Studios

'Khoj International Artists’ Association announces the launch of Are You Human?, a two-site international exhibition that explores the increasingly porous boundaries between bodies, machines, and public space. Presented at Khoj Studios (January 30th to February 28th, 2026) and DLF Avenue Mall, Saket, for a public viewing (January 30th to February 10th, 2026), the exhibition brings together Indian and international artists to interrogate how technology reshapes identity, intimacy, and everyday life.

The exhibition will be accompanied by Notes from the Digital Underground: Bodies–Machines–Publics, a two-day symposium conceptualised by Khoj with Mila T. Samdub, scheduled for January 31st to February 1st, 2026, at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. 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

As the digital mediates our perception, our memories, and even our bodies, the boundaries between the organic and the machinic are becoming increasingly porous. Rather than seeing the body and the machine as separate entities in conflict or control, Are You Human? creates space to approach them connectedly. It explores 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. Can technology, ecology, and society exist in dialogue? In harmony, even? What can feminist code offer in dismantling the patriarchal foundations of digital space? As technologies and AI advance, how do surveillance systems extract intimacy from already vulnerable bodies, and what forms of resistance emerge? In a moment when truth is unstable, and realities are increasingly manufactured, what becomes of democracy? How is technology reconfiguring relations between centres and peripheries?

The ambition of the Notes from the Digital Underground symposium is to study, unstitch, and refract the digital in the radically uneven geography of contemporary India. 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 symposium brings together a mix of established speakers from both international and Indian contexts to engage with the project’s themes. Recognising how socio-geographical contexts shape and redefine our understandings of technology.

Are You Human? will be on-view from January 30th to February 28th, at Khoj Studios and DLF Avenue Mall, Saket, for a public viewing from January 30th to February 10th. 

Notes from the Digital Underground: Bodies–Machines–Publics is scheduled for January 31st to February 1st, 2026, at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. 

Date 29.1.2026