On a warm February noon in south Delhi, amid the residential lanes of Khirkee Extension, a simple question is printed on paper: Are you human? The typography resists easy reading. It is an apt prelude to an exhibition that is more interested in destabilising the assumptions that structure our pre-pandemic life.
Are You Human?, a two-site international exhibition organised by Khoj International Artists’ Association, unfolds simultaneously across the organisation’s long-standing studios and the brightly surveilled corridors of DLF Avenue Mall in Saket. Running till February 28, at Khoj Studios, and till February 10 at the mall, the exhibition brings together artists from India, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the UK and beyond. The works span AI, gaming, VR, speculative biology, sound, video, zines and installation. What joins them is an urgency to understand how evolving technologies are reorganising what it means to be human in the 2020s.
This is not Khoj’s first engagement with technology. Since the early 2010s, the organisation has consistently returned to questions of digitality, labour, gender and ecology. What distinguishes Are You Human? is the sense that the inquiry has reached a tipping point with chatter of agentic AI and fights over semiconductors. “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,” says Pooja Sood, director of Khoj. That long view is reinforced by Notes from the Digital Underground: Bodies-Machines-Publics, a two-day symposium held at the Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan.
Machines are talking
Inside Khoj Studios, the exhibition unfolds at an unhurried pace. There is no linear narrative, no wall text announcing conclusions. Instead, the visitor moves between floors where machines appear to talk, imagine, judge and speculate.
In System for Refusal by Cyanne van den Houten from The Netherlands, five AI agents debate with one another, from the political to the philosophical. Reading the exchange on a screen, one becomes aware of how easily human forms of speech can be mimicked, and how little that guarantees understanding.
Elsewhere, Tomo Kihara and Playfool’s Deviation Game transforms the gallery into a site of play. The work invites multiple participants to collaborate against an AI system. Players must draw prompts in a way that fellow humans can recognise but an AI model cannot. If at least one human guesses correctly before the AI, humans win. The pleasure of the game lies in miscommunication. It is celebrating a form of intelligence that is contextual and social.
One of the most quietly radical gestures in the exhibition appears in the form of a circuit board, or rather, something that resembles one. In Clay PCB: Eco-Feminist Decolonial Hardware, Patricia J Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz reimagine the printed circuit board as a handmade object crafted from clay. The work draws attention to the material violence embedded in everyday technologies, such as illegal mining, conflict minerals, exploitative labour and electronic waste. By proposing what they call “feminist hardware”, the artists challenge the neutrality of technological infrastructure.
In Bengaluru-based Anisha Baid’s work, materiality returns as a theme, which weaves together the body, labour and interface. In one installation, the humble mouse pad becomes a site of strain and endurance. In the mall, a house-of-cards-like structure made of green glass panels bears quotes from tech CEOs, venture capitalists and corporate leaders, statements about inevitability, progress and disruption. The quotations were extracted from interviews, speeches and social media posts. “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them,” reads one by Steve Jobs. Nearby, Sam Altman’s assertion of an “unstoppable technological course” sits alongside Marc Andreessen’s calculus of pain.
Other than how technology governs the present times, several works also look towards futures shaped by data and depletion. In Ecological Plus by Dimension Plus, visitors enter a darkened room where a screen displays AI-generated species. The data feeding the system is drawn from existing records. From this archive, the AI imagines how species might evolve over the next hundred years.
What does it mean for machines to imagine nature’s future when human action is pushing for its destruction? That question takes on a raw force in Gondwana, a VR installation by Ben Andrews and Emma Roberts. Wearing a headset and holding joysticks, visitors enter a dense rainforest. They move through trees and undergrowth, light shifts from day to dusk. In my encounter, a large blue bird appears, almost intimate, as I stood before it. Outside the VR room, however, a screen tracks rainforest depletion in real time, projecting how much of the ecosystem will be lost by the end of the exhibition. The contrast can be mind-boggling. Inside, an immersive simulation of lush and abundance, while outside, a record of collapse hanging on a wall.
Surveillance as spectacle
If Khoj Studios invites contemplation, the presentation at DLF Avenue Mall operates on a different register. Four kiosks are inserted directly into the flow of shoppers. The goal is to reach people who might never step into a contemporary art space, and to confront them with the systems already shaping their lives.
In Judgement Day by Arunav Rajesh from IIT Kanpur’s HIVE Lab, visitors sit in front of a screen while a camera scans their face. The system then classifies them based on gender, background, disposition. The results are often wrong. In one instance, the system identifies me as a Gujarati man with a ‘Caution’ tag. That error is the point of the work, as it exposes the racialised and biased logics embedded in facial recognition systems.
A different kind of warning emerges in Pooja is Calling, a pop anthem by Hasan Shahrukh that addresses online extortion and dating scams. Framed like a catchy music video, the work narrates scenarios in which intimacy becomes leverage and images become blackmailing weapons.
Several works also ask what becomes of artistic labour in a world where machines can generate images, texts and products at scale. The Leewardists’ We Don’t Need Artists questions not just the “who-did-it” angle but also its relevance. If AI can produce convincing visuals, where does meaning reside? This reminded me of the whole conversation on Ghibli AI art generation and Miyazaki’s “insult to life itself” stance.
What unites these works is not a single argument but a shared refusal to generalise experience. “At Khoj, the idea of a ‘shared ground’ emerges not from sameness, but from an ongoing negotiation in which difference itself becomes a critical resource for thinking, research, and exchange,” says Sood. “Encounters with and understandings of lived realities, especially that of technology and surveillance, are deeply shaped by local, political, and cultural contexts. Rather than attempting to universalise these perspectives, we want to situate diverse practices in relation to one another while remaining sensitive to their distinct contexts.”
So, are you human? By the time one leaves the exhibition, the question posed by the title feels less like a login screen prompt and more of an ethical point. To ask “are you human?” is to question the conditions under which humanity and its values are measured. And, it does not offer solutions. It only asks viewers to notice where they are seen, and where and how they are reduced to a data point. In doing so, the works position art not as commentary on technology use, but as a method for thinking critically.