Courtesy of Pooja Sood.

What can art do? What should art do? What can art be?

These questions sit at the heart of socially-engaged art practices. As a form that prioritises participation, community, and lived experience, socially-engaged art operates beyond traditional aesthetics, often responding to urgent social, political, and economic realities.

Over the past 15 years, Khoj has actively worked with and within its neighbourhood, Khirkee, using art as an intervention to address urban inequality, marginalisation, and the complexities of transient communities. These long-term engagements have shaped Khoj’s curatorial approach, and inspired us to consider new ways of thinking about the role of art in public life. However, this comes with inherent tensions — questions around sustainability, economic viability, authorship, and ethics.

There is a need to critically examine the potential and limitations of socially-engaged art. Can such work exist outside institutional support, or does it inevitably require resources from galleries, museums, and funding bodies? How do we measure its impact when its effects may be intangible or long-term? And most importantly, how do we ensure that socially-engaged practices will foster genuine, non-extractive collaboration with communities, rather than reinforcing existing hierarchies of power?

Pooja Sood is a founding member and Director of Khoj International Artists’ Association, a not-for-profit society committed to experimentation and exchange in the visual arts in India. Under her stewardship, Khoj has grown from an annual event in 1997 to a vibrant building-based institution which plays a central role in the development of experimental, interdisciplinary and critical contemporary art practice in India and South Asia. Pooja is on the Advisory Board of the Prince Claus Foundation (2023-2026), a member of the International Programme Advisory Committee of IFACCA( 2024-25) and on the Board of Public Arts Trust of India, Jaipur. She has served on several international juries, most recently being the Nordic Cultural Fund (2022-2024), the Omega Resilience Awards (2023), the Rockefeller - Care Fellowship for Bellagio (2022), and has been an advisor and mentor for the South-South Asia Fellowship (2022-2023).