Call for Application: Archival Fellowship, Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) (CLOSED)

India Foundation for the Arts
in collaboration with the
Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD)

invites applications for

Two Archival Fellowships
Application deadline: September 29, 2017

This initiative is supported by TATA TRUSTS

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) in collaboration with the Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK), Ambedkar University Delhi invites applications for archival fellowships for a period of 12 months.

The Archival and Museum Fellowships initiative of IFA began with the two-fold objective of providing practitioners with an opportunity to generate new, critical and creative approaches to public engagement with materials in archives and museums; and to energise these spaces as platforms for dialogue and discourse.

About the IFA-CCK Fellowships:
The aim of the fellowships is to support arts practitioners: curators, art historians, designers, visual artists, researchers and others, to engage with the material in the Delhi Visual Archive at CCK in innovative and original ways. The Delhi Visual Archive is a repository of the visual history of Delhi, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The objective of these fellowships is to open-up the archive to the public in multiple ways so that it is not merely used as a resource for looking at the past, but also as material for interpreting the living present.

Two fellowships will be awarded:

Fellowship I will support a practitioner in curating a virtual exhibition from the material available in the archive. Besides the exhibition, other expected outcomes would need to include curated public events such as talks and workshops around the material in the archive, during the fellowship period.

Fellowship II will support a practitioner towards curating a physical exhibition from the archive, which will then travel to two cities. Besides the exhibition other expected outcomes would need to include curated public events such as talks and workshops around the material in the archive, during the fellowship period.

About the Delhi Visual Archive (1880-1980) at CCK:
The Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK) in Ambedkar University Delhi is an interdisciplinary research centre that works in partnership with local individuals and organisations. The objective is to foster a reciprocal dialogue between knowledge emerging from communities at the margins, with the mainstream, in the absence of which local knowledge and identity will continue to lose out.

As part of this endeavour, CCK is working towards building an archive of visual history of Delhi, over the nineteenth and twentieth century. The Delhi Visual Archive of everyday images is an initiative to fill in gaps in the historical records of Delhi by re-examining the relationship between the visual and the written, and facilitate new kinds of research and creative projects.

The photographs in the archive have been sourced from personal holdings and amateur photographers in Delhi. These images see the city of Delhi as marked by multiple life-worlds, of being many things to many people. The collection goes beyond the popular images of monuments and landmarks, to see lives, livelihoods, professions, street life, festivities and other happenings in the city. Currently the archive holds about 4500 digitised photographs.

For more information visit http://www.cckonline.in/cameras-of-the-past.html

For more information about the Delhi Visual Archive please contact Parul Malik at parulmalik@aud.ac.in / tel: +91 9999172797

Applications are welcome for Fellowship I and Fellowship II

Applicant profile:
We seek applications from curators, historians, visual artists, researchers and other creative practitioners with previous curatorial experience and a strong interest in visual archives and the history of Delhi. Practitioners who are Indian nationals or have been a resident of India for five or more years are eligible to apply.

To know more about our eligibility criteria please click here.

Financial assistance and other support:
Each fellowship provides an honorarium of Rs 2,00,000 for the duration of 12 months. A separate budget will be provided for the final outcome (exhibition, etc).

Important dates:
The deadline for receiving applications is September 29, 2017
Shortlisted candidates will be informed by the first week of October 2017
Interviews with shortlisted candidates are expected to take place by the second week of October 2017
The Fellowship will commence from November 01, 2017 for a period of 12 months

Application Process:
Your application must include:

  • Mention of the fellowship you are applying for: Fellowship 1 OR Fellowship II.
  • A brief description of an exhibition you can imagine from this archive.
  • A brief note on the public programmes you could potentially develop from the Delhi Visual Archive. The intention is to give us an idea of how you would like to approach this project.
  • A letter of interest explaining how you would benefit from this archival fellowship. Please identify aspects of your practice that you think will be honed and further developed during the course of the Fellowship.
  • A brief description of a project you have been involved with either as a curator, arts practitioner or researcher. The description would include the vision, the approach, the processes and the outcomes that have resulted from the project. Please include documentation of the project, which could include 6 to 8 scanned or printed images with titles and date, DVD (max 4 minutes), catalogues, artworks, performances, or reviews.
  • Your curriculum vitae.

Please email a copy of the required documents to suman@indiaifa.org, and also post a hard copy to IFA in an envelope marked 'IFA & CCK Fellowship' by September 29, 2017.

India Foundation for the Arts
'Apurva', Ground Floor,
No 259, 4th Cross, RMV 2nd Stage, 2nd Block
Bangalore - 560 094, India