Request for Proposals: IFA-Gurusaday Creative Grants | Deadline: October 30, 2020

India Foundation for the Arts
in collaboration with the
Gurusaday Museum, Kolkota
invites applications for
Two IFA-Gurusaday Museum Creative Grants
Under its Archives and Museums programme

Application deadline: Friday, October 30, 2020
 

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) in collaboration with Gurusaday Museum, Kolkota invites applications for Two IFA-Gurusaday Museum Creative Grants, under its Archives and Museums programme.

The Archives and Museums programme of IFA has been initiated with a two-fold objective - to provide arts practitioners and researchers with an opportunity to generate new, critical, and creative approaches for public engagement with archives and museum collections; and energise these spaces as platforms for dialogue and discourse. For more information, click here.

About Gurusaday Museum: Situated in the south-western fringes of Kolkata, Gurusday Museum is one of the largest repositories of 'folk arts' from undivided Bengal under a single roof. Its impressive range of kanthas (embroidered quilts), patachitra (painted scrolls), indigenous playing cards, sweetmeat moulds, ritual and theatre masks, medieval manuscripts, wood and stone sculptures, speak volumes about the fluidity between leisure, creativity and productivity that characterised life in rural Bengal, often reflected in traditions handed down by women. The core collection was painstakingly put together by a Bengali civil servant, Gurusaday Dutt (1882-1941) between 1920 and 1940, in an attempt to carve out a space for a regional cultural identity under the broad umbrella of the nationalist movement. Today, while it offers an opportunity to reflect on the politics of defining 'folk' cultures, the museum continues to play an active role in facilitating present-day practitioners of these living traditions. Apart from the artefacts, the museum also hosts Dutt's library, which features many rare volumes - sometimes with hidden clues of his own reading habits. Please visit www.gurusadaymuseum.org for more information about the museum and the collection.

For the IFA-Gurusaday Grants, the Museum will open-up two of its most valued collections for research - the kantha and the patachitra collections.

The kantha collection: The Gurusaday Museum holds arguably the single largest collection of nakshi kantha or embroidered quilts from undivided Bengal. There are six different varieties of kantha at the museum - sujni, durjani, arshilata, baithan, rumal, and lep - which are a testament to the spontaneous creativity and expertise that was handed down across generations predominantly by women. While most kanthas are anonymous, and possibly the result of cumulative efforts of multiple generations, there are a few where the creators have embroidered their names as well. One such, the handiwork of Manadasundari Dasi, is one of the most astonishing examples of its kind. Hailing from Jangal Badhal in Khulna (present-day Bangladesh), Manadasundari's kantha is an encyclopaedic attempt, depicting both the ghor and bahir—the home and the world—of undivided, colonial Bengal. She wove in scenes from their everyday lives—vignettes from the women’s quarters, the outer living room, domesticated animals—alongside documenting the British presence that was altering the fabric of their very existence. As the guides at the museum will tell you, you can look at them for years and still expect to spot some new motif that the artist had cleverly concealed among its weaves.

The patachitra collection: Patachitra or painted scrolls constitute another significant section of Gurusaday Museum's collection. Originally used as illustrative paintings by itinerant performers in pre-colonial Bengal, these vibrant scrolls hang silently behind glass cases at the museum today, waiting to be re-animated by the songs and stories they helped to tell in a pre-literate society. They tell many stories that would have been lost otherwise - tales that were held in the collective memory in various forms across the centuries - as well as more popular ones, such as Krisnalila or the cult of Devi Manasa. But even the history of the form holds many secrets that are nearly forgotten today - such as how different castes and religions came to be confused as the community of artists and story-tellers emerged; or how they used natural dyes that gave these paintings their vibrancy and energy. While collecting the scrolls, Gurusasday Dutt was careful to note down many of the songs that patuas sang or remembered, many of which are accessible in the museum's library.

About the IFA-Gurusaday Museum Creative Grants: The grants offer creative practitioners the kantha and patachitra collections to work with, in imaginative ways, for a period of a year. The awardees will need to curate small exhibitions and present the collection through a series of activities such as talks, workshops and other public programmes both online and offline. The focus of these grants is to engage the audience with objects from the collection in as many different ways as possible exploring new possibilities both in the form and content of these engagements. For information about the collection, please contact Bijan Kumar Mondal, Curator and Executive Secretary at gsmuseum@rediffmail.com.

Applicant profile: Curators, visual artists, historians, researchers and creative practitioners with prior curatorial experience and a strong interest in research and working with museum collections. We also encourage applicants to think through interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches and methods. Practitioners who are Indian nationals or have been residents of India for five years or more are eligible to apply. To know more about our eligibility criteria, please click here. Applicants from West Bengal will be given preference. We also encourage applications in Bangla.

Application Process: Your application must include:

• A proposal briefly describing an exhibition as well as a series of other engagements you could develop from either the kantha or the patachitra collection from the Gurusaday Museum. The description should include your vision, approach, methodologies and strategies for public engagements. The intention is to give us an idea of how you would like to work with the collection.
• A detailed budget.
• Your curriculum vitae with a brief description of a project you have been involved with as a curator, arts practitioner, or researcher. This description should comprise the vision, approach, processes, and outcomes that have resulted from that project. Please send us links and not attachments.

• You can request for support up to Rs 2,00,000/-
• You may budget for an honorarium of Rs 12,000/- per month subject to a limit of Rs 1,44,000/- for the entire duration of the grant. Please note that the total grant amount is inclusive of the honorarium.
• Our funds will cover only project-related costs and activities and will not pay for infrastructure costs or equipment purchase.
• Please ensure that each budget category pertains to a specific item of project-related expenditure.
• Please budget for an accountant’s fee of up to Rs 3,000/- only.

• The deadline for receiving applications is Friday, October 30, 2020.
• Interviews with shortlisted candidates are expected to take place in November 2020.
• The Grant will commence in December 2020 for a period of one year.