[Reader-list] New Visual Galleries of Popular Art

[Tasveer Ghar]

Tasveer Ghar Newsletter
Spring 2008

Dear friends
Tasveer Ghar (the House of Pictures), a trans-national digital archive
of south Asia's popular visual culture, is happy to announce the first
anniversary of its founding. We formally started in January 2007 with
an aim to collect, digitize, and document various materials produced
by South Asia's exciting popular visual sphere, including posters,
calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings,
advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.

In July 2007, Tasveer Ghar awarded a few short-term fellowships to
document several unique forms of popular visual arts of India with a
focus on "Gender, Nation and Spaces for the Everyday", to culminate in
the digitization of several collected specimens and their virtual
exhibition on our website at the end of the fellowship year. It was an
exciting beginning with three principal Fellows and six other grantees
spread all over India, who began working on a really wide spectrum of
topics ranging from South Indian display dolls to Bhojpuri raunchy
album covers and much more!

We are now pleased to announce the first batch of these exciting
virtual galleries. You can visit these online exhibits and enjoy the
richness of their visuals and accompanied essays on the following
links. We would be very happy to receive your feedback about them:

1. Miniature Societies and Grihani Aesthetics: Display Dolls from Southern India
By Annapurna Garimella
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/annapurna/

2. Catering to Indian and British Tastes: Gender in Early Indian Print
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By Javed Masood
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/javed/

3. A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Album Covers: Transitioning
Sexualized Imagery
By Vishal Rawlley
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/vishal/

4. Objects of Desire: Commodification of Gender on the Titles of
Popular Hindi Novels
By Atmaram K. Bhakal
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/atmaram/

The above galleries are part of a larger series of visual
presentations which we hope to continue evolving with much more
exciting material. Don't forget to visit on our website some of the
earlier visual galleries produced by eminent art collectors and
scholars.

Another new and interesting feature on our website is the "Picture of
the Month" where we present a unique photograph or image depicting a
quirky example from South Asian popular culture, and expect the
readers/visitors to comment on it. See one of our first such image on
the link below:

http://tasveerghar.net/picomonth.html

INVITATION:
Tasveer Ghar also invites artists, art collectors, photographers,
students and others to contribute exciting images representing
examples of popular visual culture of India/South Asia. You can send
us photo prints, old photographs, old printed material, photo
negatives, transparencies, digital photographs, high-resolution scans,
posters, calendar, old advertisements, printed packing material, wall
graffiti, hoardings, road-side banners, or any other medium,
preferably mass-produced or truly archival and rare, but representing
certain popular trends of our society. You can get a sense of the
kinds of materials we are looking for in our Call for Proposals on our
website. Your contributions, if accepted by us, would be compensated
with a basic honorarium. We can also sign a contract with you about
the use of such images. Kindly send us samples of such art work, so
that we can respond.

Your contribution to Tasveer Ghar could either be one or two
interesting images, or a series of related images that we can use for
a thematic virtual gallery. A virtual gallery is basically a
compilation of images (say between 8 and 15, or even more, if
necessary) depicting a unique aspect of popular visual culture. Such
images are generally accompanied by a text introduction and detailed
captions that weave all the images into one coherent presentation
spread over several interactive pages on the website. The individual
images could either be scans of authentic artwork or photographs of
scenarios (streets or homes) where such public art is displayed. A
contributor can either send us hard copies of images or electronic
versions (scanned in the prescribed format). Tasveer Ghar will not buy
or own the image contributed by you. If you submit hard copies of any
art work, we will return the same to you after digitizing it. The
contributor would have to provide the text and captions for the images
(or any other details that may be necessary for the gallery). Very
soon, we are also going to announce the Call for Proposal for our
short-term fellowships for the year 2008.

We also invite authors who have recently published books or essays on
south Asian visual culture, or scholars hosting conferences on visual
culture to inform us about their ventures, so that we can provide a
link on our website to their books, conferences or other related
resources.

Looking forward to your participation in the building of our virtual
House of Pictures.

Christiane Brosius
Manishita Dass
Sumathi Ramaswamy
Yousuf Saeed


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http://www.tasveerghar.net