Call for Application: Archival Fellowship, Asia Art Archive (CLOSED)

India Foundation for the Arts
in collaboration with
Asia Art Archive

invites applications for

One Archival Fellowship
Application deadline: April 10, 2015

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) invites applications for one Archival Fellowship, for a period of ten months, to support creative practitioners—curators, artists, designers, film-makers, art historians, programmers—to work with the materials in AAA’s digital archive, partially accessible online and fully available on site, in Delhi and Hong Kong. The intention is to give applicants the opportunity to engage with the archive in innovative and original ways, culminating in tangible outcomes such as an exhibition, film, web-design, publication, etc., at the end of ten months in April 2016.

IFA’s Archival Fellowships have been initiated with the two-fold objective of providing creative practitioners with an opportunity to generate new, critical, and creative approaches to public engagement with archives while energising archives as spaces for dialogue and discourse.

For more information about IFA, please see our website www.indiaifa.org

About Asia Art Archive and its collection:
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. 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. For more information about the AAA collection, programmes, and projects, please visit www.aaa.org.hk

About the IFA-AAA Fellowship
For this Archival fellowship, the AAA collection offers a wide range of material pertaining to the history of visual arts in India, ranging from scanned images of artworks and events, to published magazines, to a myriad of unpublished records. This collection covers several strands of arts practice, and lends itself particularly to the exploration of valuable yet less-attended to exhibition histories, artist magazines, artist-run-spaces, and Living Traditions of India. Given the richly annotated digital content in the archive, this fellowship gives a unique opportunity to web-designers and data-visualizers as much as to other creative practitioners. Click here for a list of AAA Collection highlights on India Projects.

For more information about the Archive, please contact Sabih Ahmed at sabih@aaa.org.hk

AAA wishes to thank The Avantha Group for their generous support.

About the Fellowship

  • Applicant profile: We seek applications from creative practitioners with previous artistic or curatorial experience and a strong interest in archives. From visual artists and designers, to curators and programmers, this fellowship seeks project proposals that engage with the AAA’s India Projects collection in innovative and imaginative ways. Practitioners who are Indian nationals or have been a resident of India for five or more years are eligible to apply.
  • Financial assistance & other support: The fellowship provides an honorarium of Rs 2,00,000 for the duration of 10 months to support research at the archives of AAA. The Fellowship also covers a two-week research trip to Hong Kong in 2015, where the library and physical archive of AAA is located.
  • A separate budget will be provided for the final outcome.
  • ​Important dates:
    • The deadline for receiving applications is April 10, 2015
    • Shortlisted candidates will be informed by April 24, 2015
    • Interviews with shortlisted candidates are expected to take place in the 
      first week of May, 2015
    • The Fellowship will commence on May 25, 2015 for a period of 10 months

Application Process
Your application must include:

  • 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 short description of the project you would like to work on using the AAA archive as a resource, explaining in detail the framework, concept, methodology, and outcome;
  • A brief description of a project you have been involved with either as a curator, arts practitioner, researcher. The description should include the vision, approach, processes, and outcomes that have resulted from the project. Please include documentation of the project, which may 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 address any queries related to the application process to suman@indiaifa.org or call +91 80 23414681/82.

Please post the required documents to IFA in an envelope marked ‘Archival Fellowship: IFA & AAA’ by April 10, 2015. Please also email a soft copy of your application to suman@indiaifa.org

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