Staying Connected #13 | Different Projects, Diverse Tastes | October 29, 2020

Does your taste in art change with time? Do you and your friends seek the same aesthetic engagement? Is it not a great wonder that aesthetic joy can flow from so many diverse places?

Today, under the Staying Connected Series by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), we bring you two different projects from the world of arts and culture world that we hope you will like engaging with. An online community that discusses objects from the past and a website dedicated to children’s literature of the 19th century Bengal.

OBJECTSPEAK by Lina Vincent

OBJECTSPEAK is an online platform for sharing visuals and mini-stories about objects and to build an ongoing online archive of items that are handmade or produced for different contexts and purposes, of origin prior to mid-20th century from all over the world. Lina encourages its members to relook at objects around them and think about its changing contexts and meanings. This project is connected to her work with the collection at Goa Chitra, Goa Chakra and Goa Cruti museums. Click here to join the group on facebook and click here for the instagram page.  

Lina received a fellowship from IFA to work with the Goa Chitra Museum, Goa, under the Archival & Museum Fellowship programme that was made possible with support from Tata Trusts in 2018.

Children’s Books from Bengal: A Documentation by Gargi Gangopadhyay

A website featuring visual and bibliographical documentation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengali children’s books. These include alphabet books, primers, readers, school-texts, advice books, fables and moralities and a large section of what can be collectively termed as a ‘leisure’ or ‘entertaining’ literature for children – ranging from folk and fairy tales, mythological narratives, original fiction and children’s verses to juvenile periodicals and books on popular science. The research documents books from sixteen libraries and private collections located in West Bengal, Bangladesh and UK. Click here to visit the website.

Gargi Gangopadhyay received a grant from IFA, under its Arts Research and Documentation programme that was made possible with support from Priti Paul in 2008.