2015 programming in India
Asia Art Archive
233 Hollywood Road
Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
Asia Art Archive (AAA) is pleased to announce a range of programmes, initiatives, and publications developed from ongoing research projects in India that will launch in 2015:
The Baroda Archives is a digitisation project comprising of 40,000+ scanned and annotated documents that make up the four personal collections of Jyoti Bhatt, Ratan Parimoo, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and K.G. Subramanyan—artists and influential teachers in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. This project brings to light the role that art schools played in shaping the field of visual arts in post-colonial India when pedagogy and experimentation coalesced to think about art anew.
Archival Fellowship will invite creative practitioners—from visual artists and designers, to curators and programmers—to propose projects that engage the AAA collection in innovative and imaginative ways. In collaboration with India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), this fellowship will be AAA’s first initiative to activate new responses to its collections in India. Open call for applications will commence on 15 February 2015.
Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing of India project is an extensive and growing database of art writing from the late 19th century until 1990s across 13 languages. With a listing of more than 12,000 texts that have been compiled from books, catalogues, periodicals, and newspapers, this project is the first online resource of its kind that offers innovative tools for research to map complex historical patterns and trends in the field.
The Art of Dissemination: Writing Cultures colloquiumis a continuation of AAA’s effort to map key debates in modern art across different Indian languages. AAA will collaborate with the Centre of Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, to organise this multidisciplinary colloquium that is also a part of the Archive’s Publications Project, which seeks to address the urgencies around modern art in India through translated volumes of notable art writing. (13–14 February 2015)
Asia Art Archive at India Art Fair 2015 will present a collaborative project with artist Shilpa Gupta. AAA researchers Sabih Ahmed and Sneha Ragavan will also give a talk titled “Bibliophilia: Art History and its Imprints” on 1 February at the Spotlight Series at YES BANK Lounge. (29 January–1 February 2015)
Asia Art Archive thanks the following for their support: The Avantha Group, Burger Collection, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and India Foundation for the Arts.
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With an international Board of Directors, an Advisory Board made up of noted scholars and curators, and an in-house research team, AAA has collated one of the most valuable collections of material on contemporary art in the region—open to the public free of charge and increasingly accessible from its website. More than a static repository waiting to be discovered, AAA instigates critical thinking and dialogue for a wide range of audiences via public, research, residential and educational programmes.
