Tg Call For Proposals

Tasveer Ghar Fellowships 2007 on Gender, Nation and Spaces of the Everyday

Call for Proposals We are pleased to invite proposals for short-term fellowships involving the collection and documentation of unique forms of popular visual arts of India with a focus on "Gender, Nation and Spaces for the Everyday", resulting in the digitization of the collected specimens and their virtual exhibition on the website of Tasveer Ghar (in collaboration with the Institute of International Social History, Amsterdam), at the end of the fellowship. The estimated duration of the fellowship is 6 months. What do we mean by Popular Visual Arts of India? Indian streets and public spaces are full of a variety of popular art forms such as posters, prints, calendars, advertisements, hoardings, religious iconography, photo portraits, cinema images and so on, that reflect the changing aesthetics of the urban popular culture. Most of these art forms are rather transitory – you see them one day, and they disappear or transform the next day depending upon the changes in the lifestyles of the people, as well as the available techniques of image-making and duplication. There is an urgent need to collect/document these and study the context in which they are produced and used. Despite the slipperiness of popular visual culture it is, as Patricia Uberoi has coined it, "ultimately more enabling than disabling... It may imply the everyday, unremarkable, and ordinary, or it may refer to dramatic eruptions against the established, normative order. It may indicate the culture of 'the people', in the sense of folk culture; of it may refer exclusively to products of the modern mass media in industrialized, capitalist societies, emphasizing their wide popularity, circulation, and saturation." (Patricia Uberoi. 2006. Freedom and Destiny. Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press: 4). Through this concept, we try to make critical interventions about the image as an arena of contestation between hegemonic ideas and resistance, link the image to its wider domain of visibility and performance; event and practice; to agents of production, dissemination and consumption of the 'imaginaire populaire', and to the ways in which pictures negotiate - and shape - images of the world, of Selves and Others. Thus, through our engagements with setting up a digital database, we seek to transgress the borders of 'collecting' and displaying. We search for contexts, for ways of annotating without caging the image. For all this, we seek your participation - and the participation and support of other scholars and collectors of Popular Visual Culture in South Asia.

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Theme for 2007: Gender, Nation and Spaces of the Everyday What can we see, and argue, about representations of gender in contemporary popular visual media in India? In this project that will merge into a virtual exhibition, we engage in questions of how gender is represented in a range of still pictures: poster art, comics, postcards, record-covers, book illustrations, or advertisements. We are looking for people who want to explore and relate sets of representations of gendered identities to the creation of a) nationality, b) transnationality or c) regionality, for instance, by means of an already existing private collection or a cluster of images available in the public domain but yet not ‘captured’. How do these ‘families’ of images correspond or collide with complex concepts such as tradition and modernity; public and private; religion, governance and civil society? How do they foster notions of new lifestyles and taste, ‘new men’ and ‘new women’? Do these images, and the contexts in which they circulate, affirm stereotypes or contest and even subvert common clichés of womanhood, masculinity, or homosexuality? In what way are the images linked to particular rituals and other performative displays of feasting and entertainment, e.g. weddings, birthdays, national parades and holidays? How are these narratives challenged by burgeoning consumerism, new opportunities and choices offered by the liberalized market? What are the moral and social norms and cultural imperatives of seeing a set of selected images?

Some key issues that could be dealt with: • • • • • • • • • •

Commodification and objectification of women and men Icons of the nation – heroes, villains, martyrs and heroines Shifting frames: Gender between politics, religion and civility Plurality and difference Change of representations through new media technologies Youth, Joint family, work, consumption, leisure Romantic love, arranged marriage Disjunctures between image and reading Journeys/Circulations of icons Desire, consumption and resistance: agency and alternative/dissident voices

We would like fellows to come up with ethnographies of images, with image essays, explore new patterns and chains of seeing and displaying gender. By ethnographies, what we mean is to provide "thick descriptions" for each collected image: not just contexts of production, but of circulation, usage, and so on; how each image might fit into a particular "inter-ocular" universe... Be really creative. Before you write your proposal, kindly see our Frequently Asked Questions to get some practical tips on applying for this fellowship,

such as who is eligible to apply, what does the fellowship provide, what should your proposal contain, and so on.

Frequently Asked questions Who is eligible to apply? This fellowship is ideally meant for individuals or groups who already have an important collection of popular arts that needs to be archived, digitized, or restored, but may not have the resources or know-how to go about doing that. We are also open to proposals that seek to start a new collection or document/photograph something that is available in a public space and needs urgent attention (say, some unique political graffiti on the streets of Kolkata!). Currently we offer this fellowship to individuals or groups based in India only. In exceptional cases, we may consider projects from outside India, but the subject of research/documentation would have to be Indian and the artwork needs to be sent to New Delhi, India. There is no bar of age or educational qualification, as long as you are capable to conducting the entire research/documentation on your own, and possibly provide a context to your work in the form of a text report. What would a fellow be expected to do? You are free to carry on your research/documentation in any manner that suits your subject. However, after the approval of your proposal and the granting of the fellowship, Tasveer Ghar may present some advice or guidelines on how you could go about conducting your fellowship. At the onset of your fellowship period, you should ideally make a calendar of 6 months period and follow it accordingly. You are expected to make/organize your arts collection and/or write a report about it. You could either send the artworks to us (at your cost) for digitization, or digitize it yourself using the guidelines suggested by us. The collected material sent to us would be returned to you after digitization/scanning (at TG's cost). Currently, Tasveer Ghar does not provide the facility for the physical storage of the specimens. TG will also not provide the facility to “restore” the artworks. Your project could be co-funded by another institution. You shall be responsible for acquiring any copyright permission required for the artwork. What does the Tasveer Ghar fellowship provide you? Although you can send us a detailed estimate of what your documentation would cost, we shall provide a maximum of Rs.60,000 (Indian Rupees sixty thousand) spread over a period of six months to each fellow. This amount would include the cost of your sending of the artwork to us for digitization. In case you wish to do the digitization/ scanning of images yourself, no extra funds would be available for that. Taxes as levied by the government of India would be applicable to

the fellowship payment. We expect you to have a Indian PAN number and a bank account in order to receive the fellowship payment. What the fellowship will not support? We would not support any infrastructural costs such as setting up of an office, buying of equipment, daily meals, or per diem etc. TG is also not in a position of “purchasing” the antique art work from the collector. The fellowship will also not support the making of new artworks by an artist. Although we would be open to look at exceptional cases. What we are currently not looking for are the strictly traditional art forms such as the folk arts, classical arts, or art with archaeological importance, unless any of these reflect the change or transformation brought about by modernity, urbanization and so on. In fact, your objective of the research need not be strictly the documentation or collection of a certain art form. It could even involve, say, contextualizing certain trends of popular aesthetics, such as “politics or economics of popular art”, or “aesthetics of election campaign”. What should your proposal contain? Although we encourage you to write your proposal in any manner that enables you to clearly state your objectives, here are a few guidelines that you may follow: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Title of the project Short introduction (one paragraph) Background/Objectives/relevance (1-2 page) Activities/Timeline planned Requirements/estimated cost What has earlier been done on this artwork/subject? Provide a short survey of the available material (maybe a bibliography). How is your project unique? 7. What makes you the best person to do this project? 8. A summary of the proposal (max 300 words) You may also provide the following with the proposal: 1. Your curriculum vitae 2. Sample of art work (photos, prints, video, text etc.) maximum 3 specimens (preferably, in the form of an email attachment - you may even direct us to a Internet site where such art specimens are on display). 3. Names and addresses of two people in the field who know you How to send the proposal? You would need to send your proposal in Microsoft Word format by email to [email protected]. If you need to send more than one attachments that are over 1MB in size, you may send them in separate emails, clearly giving a brief title of your proposal in the subject line. You may also provide a list of all the attachments, in the body of the email. If you need to send a specimen in hard copy, please

ask us for the mailing address. After we receive your proposal, you will be given a reference number which you must quote for all correspondence related to your proposal. Last date of submission of proposals: April 30, 2007 Announcement of the selected fellows/projects: May 31st, 2007 Commencement of fellowship: June 15th, 2007 Last date of submission of materials: December 15th, 2007 Inauguration of the virtual exhibit: January 1st, 2008 If the above FAQs do not provide your satisfactory answers, you may write to us. You may also send us a brief idea of your research topic for our advice before sending the full proposal. http://www.tasveerghar.net Email: [email protected] Phone: +91-9810379016