[Reader-list] Newsletter: January 2009

[Tasveer Ghar]

Dear Friends
A very happy new year, 2009, and a warm welcome to Tasveer Ghar (the
House of Pictures), a digital archive of South Asian popular visual
culture

We are delighted to announce the following new exciting projects and
features of our growing archive:

1. The Priya Paul Collection of Visual Popular Art at Tasveerghar:

Priya Paul, a well known Indian entrepreneur and the current
Chairperson of Apeejay Park Hotels, has been an ardent collector of
Indian art, contemporary as well as popular/archival art. Her
collection of old posters, calendars, postcards, commercial
advertisements, textile labels and cinema posters, painstakingly
accumulated over several decades, is one of the finest archives of
such ephemera in India. Tasveer Ghar was commissioned to digitize and
archive this important collection in 2008. Each image needed careful
handling, cleaning, scanning, digital photography, classification, and
creation of detailed metadata. It took more than 3 months to
physically handle and scan the images into raw digital data. Part of
the work was funded by the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a
Global Context" at Heidelberg University. The formatting and digital
restoration of all files as well as the metadata creation is still
ongoing. It is estimated that when we are all done, we will have the
digital versions of over 5000 images in the archive covering a broad
range of subjects including Indian nationalism, Hindu mythology,
Islamic iconography, commercial advertisements, popular cinema, and
portraits. This digital image archive will soon be available on
Tasveer Ghar's website for all to see and benefit from. Specified
thematic image-clusters would also be used by specialists/scholars to
write visual essays. We also present here a short video interview of
Priya Paul about her art collection (recorded in October 2008).

2. New Grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG):

Tasveer Ghar has received a generous grant of three years of funding
from the German Research Foundation. This grant emerges from Tasveer
Ghar's collaboration with Heidelberg University's new Cluster of
Excellence, "Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Shifting Asymmetries
in Cultural Flows" (see
http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/Plone). This grant will
enable Tasveer Ghar to launch a new initiative on Eurasian Muslim
Popular Visual Culture, as well as strengthen our capacity to work
across and beyond the South Asian region from Delhi, and develop
institutional ties with the Cluster members at the Karl Jaspers
Centre, Heidelberg, as well as international partners. Our
collaboration with Heidelberg University's Cluster of Excellence will
lead us to track (a) the flows of images and concepts between Europe
and Asia, and within Asia; and (b) further ongoing collaboration with
European and Asian institutions/scholars/ students/practitioners. The
moving and still images collected and tagged in this process will be
fed into already-existing image archives of both Tasveer Ghar and the
Karl Jaspers Centre.

3. New Virtual Galleries of the Tasveer Ghar Fellows of 2008:

Tasveer Ghar awarded fellowships to 4 scholars on the theme:
"Kaleidoscopic Sites and Sights: The Printed Visual Culture/s of
Religious Pluralism". The work of these fellows is coming to an end
and will soon be available in the form of virtual galleries on the
following topics:

(a) Religious Iconography in the Public Sphere - Painted and Tile Gods
Adorning the Streets. (by Shirly Abraham and Amit Madhesiya)

(b) Outside the Imambara: The Lives of Pilgrimage Souvenirs
(by Subah Dayal and Suzanne Schulz)

(c) Exploring Ravidas, Understanding a Meeting Point of Faiths and Resistance
(by Daljit Ami)

(d) Challenging Dominance: The Visual Repertoire of the Bonallu
Festival and Subaltern shrines in Hyderabad (by Joe Christopher and
Alice Sampson)

Kindly visit our website for more exciting material scheduled to be
featured here soon.

As announced earlier, we look forward to your participation in the
building of our popular arts archive by contributing interesting
images.

Thanks

Christiane Brosius
Sumathi Ramaswamy
Manishita Dass
Yousuf Saeed

-- 
http://www.tasveerghar.net