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.
 • 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. Title of the project

2. Short introduction (one paragraph)
3. Background/Objectives/relevance (1-2 page)
4. Activities/Timeline planned
5. Requirements/estimated cost
6. 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 tasveerghar@gmail.com. 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: tasveerghar@gmail.com
Phone: +91-9810379016