SSAF-AAA Research Grant for Archiving Histories of Art and Culture (India)

This grant, which marks the sixth year of collaboration between SSAF and AAA in India, emerges from AAA’s ongoing endeavour to digitise, document, and make publicly accessible recent histories of art in the region by deploying a range of innovative archival practices and research methods. This grant is in line with SSAF’s commitment to work with cross-disciplinary initiatives that address the often difficult and sometimes endangered conditions of informal archiving, the challenges posed by the fugitive political conditions of their assembly and use, and the possible links of such materials with alternative and heterodox practices in the arts and in intellectual work. The grant aims to:

• Encourage the use of innovative methodologies for purposes of identifying, documenting, researching, and annotating materials that have hitherto been inaccessible in the public domain and remain precarious under shifting political climates. This could result in the creation of an archive that transforms their existing understanding of the field.
• Open up research avenues into histories viewed as constituent parts of wider discursive fields, specific regional milieus, and the politics of image-making and their circulation.
• Support projects that consider both the long- and short-term outcomes of making such materials publicly available, and suggest possible strategies.
• Support creative modes of interpretation and engagement with materials that emerge from the recognition of their contextual significance.

Applicants are encouraged to suggest new connections between print cultures, intellectual histories, visual arts, and marginalised social, political, and cultural movements; lay new trails for unpacking the archival materials developed under the grant; and explain the objectives and intent of their research.

Focus Areas 

• They invite proposals that interrogate how print and visual cultural materials of different kinds—journals, magazines, posters, pamphlets, books, little magazines, ephemera, etc.—contributed to, constituted, and were embedded in the cultural politics of a historical moment. Preference will be given to proposals that focus on print and visual cultural materials in regional languages that are out of circulation, and are not located in public collections, with an intent to make these materials accessible to the best extent possible and in the most meaningful and productive ways.
• Areas of research may include, but are not limited to:
  • Social or political movements that extended to print culture, and the visual, literary, and political histories therein.
  • The intellectual contribution of artists, activists, poets, writers, editors, designers, or publishers who played an important role in the evolution of print and visual cultural materials, and the debates involved.
  • The movement of ideas on art, literature, poetry, aesthetics, and cultural practices within print culture, and as they occur via translation between languages and contexts.

Priorities

• Research that aims to unearth print and visual cultural materials inaccessible through public collections, and that preferably engages with regional language materials and milieus.
• Research proposals that are interdisciplinary and deploy innovative methodologies, with clearly defined objectives and outcomes, and an outline of the relevant proposed area of research.
• Proposals feasible for completion within the given duration of the grant.
• Six candidates will be shortlisted for interviews on the basis of their applications. Interviews will be conducted online in October 2024. One grantee will be selected from among those interviewed by a panel consisting of one external member, one member from SSAF, and one member from AAA in India. The selected grantee will be contacted by the end of October 2024.

Funding Information 

• Grant Amount: Up to INR 3,00,000
• Duration of Grant: 1 Nov 2024–31 Oct 2025

Eligibility Criteria

• Individuals who are Indian nationals residing in India, or collectives whose members are Indian nationals residing in India, with relevant qualifications or professional experience, and who are already engaged in such research.

For more information, visit AAA.