Asia Art Archive welcomes artist-educator Lokesh Khodke to our Residency Programme.

During his residency, Lokesh Khodke will share his varied experiences with art education in India where he has worked in institutional as well as informal spaces with the AAA team. He will also combine his interest in visual narratives and storytelling with forays into AAA’s online collections.

Conceptualised during the pandemic, this residency attempts a hybrid onsite-online format where Khodke will virtually reside in and explore AAA’s digitised archival collections over a period of six months, and work closely onsite with the AAA in India office in New Delhi.

Image: Lokesh at his Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Lokesh at his Studio. Courtesy of the artist.

Lokesh Khodke is an illustrator, comics creator, and independent artist based in New Delhi. As an educator, he has worked with students across different age groups  in India. Currently, Lokesh is teaching visual communication, storyboarding, and graphic narratives as guest faculty at the Department of Animation at AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi.

Previously, Khodke worked for three years with Art1st, conducting training sessions as a mentor for primary school art teachers at private schools in Delhi. This experience made him critically examine the designing of curriculums. Khodke has also been conducting workshops with different organisations like ArtReach (Delhi) and Muskaan (Bhopal), which work closely with young children from underprivileged backgrounds. He was recipient of the Artreach-KNMA Teaching Fellowship 2020–21, through which he conducted workshops with children in the care home Karm Marg between November 2020 to May 2021.

Khodke is co-founder, co-editor, and co-organiser of several projects in the field of comics, including BlueJackal, a collective platform for publishing comics, picture books (in print and online), and organising related workshops/programmes; Indie Comix Fest (ICF) Delhi editions, a platform for small press and self-published comics; and Drawing Resistance, a Hindi/English zine which brings together visual art, poetry, short stories, essays, reports, and conversations reflecting on the current sociopolitical climate. 

Khodke worked as Project Coordinator at Asia Art Archive in India for the "Writing Art – A Publications Project" from 2014 to 2016.

This residency is part of the AAA Learning and Participation Programme, supported by the S. H. Ho Foundation Limited and C. K. and Kay Ho Foundation.