A series of workshops and intensives inspired by “Khayali Pulao”, a Hindi idiom that derives its meaning from the two words: "khayali" (imaginary) and "pulao" (rice)—something to describe daydreams, speculations, fiction, and building castles in the air.
Khayali Pulao invites visual artists and writers—at any stage of their practice—to explore art-making as a form of world-building.
Cover Image: Still from Je Tu Il Elle, Chantal Akerman, 1974.
Grounded in reflection, play, writing, and making, these sessions consider what it means to imagine and sustain a life as an artist. This is an invitation to gather outside the institution, among peers and friends, despite rejections and failures, to cook up new ways of cultivating and nourishing our practices.
Khayali Pulao is a space for speculation and social dreaming, for opening up alternative ways of thinking about our work in the present, and all its possible futures.
Khayali Pulao Reading List
This reading list is an evolving archive, which changes and grows alongside the workshops and intensives.
It gathers the texts, voices, and fragments that have shaped Khayali Pulao—books we have read and returned to during our workshops. Each time a workshop begins, new readings find their way here, while others may drift away.
There is no fixed center. You may enter anywhere. Each text connects to another through world-building, art-making, writing, fiction, speculation, play, form, processes, grief, longing, love, dreaming, home etc.,—a web of influences and curiosities that continues to grow with every conversation, every participant, every rereading.
Winter, 2025
Listening to Images
Tina M. CamptHidden Mother
Laura Larson
The Coast
Sohrab Hura
Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole
50 Lines after Figure (2001) by Glenn Ligon
Tiana Clark
Mourning Diary
Roland Barthes
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