The festival, marking a decade of the Khoj International Artists’ Association, will be a celebration of performance art, possibly for the first time in India. To be held from March 25 to 30, it will bring together 24 artists from India and abroad. “It will be a platform for performance artists who exist on the very edge of traditional forms and defy conventions by interpreting things in their own individual, often radical, ways,” says Pooja Sood, director and curator of Khoj, adding that the performance art movement began in the West to oppose the commodification of art. “Performance art practitioners often use their own bodies, as if to say that you cannot buy my body. Performance art is live art, interactive and, hence, ephemeral,” she says.

Though nascent, the performance art scene in India is vibrant. Among the 12 Indian artists who will present their works at Khoj will be Nikhil Chopra, who has been doing live art since 2002 and has performed in the US. For the Khoj show, he has created a character called Yog Chitrakaar in whose costume he will stroll around the Select Citywalk Mall. His impressions will then be reproduced in drawings.

Other artists include Sonia Khurana, whose 1999 work Bird showed her own naked and overweight body shot with an unstable, handheld camera; and Maya Krishna Rao, Kathakali artist and actor, who shuns the script during her theatre performances. “But there will be no nudity in any of the performances,” insists Sood. However, a project by Art Maharaj and Mrs Manmeet will have costumes that resemble naked figures and people will be asked to slip into them. The foreign contingent includes Mehr Javed from Pakistan, Da Motus from Switzerland and performers from Germany, Indonesia and Thailand.