Collaborations
Every year, IFA collaborates with archives and museums across the country to implement projects through an open call for proposals. This is done in partnership with the host institutions.
We have collaborated with the following museums and archives in the past few years:
2025-2026:
Chandernagore College Museum, Chandannagar, was set up in 2023 and is located in West Bengal in a city that was once a flourishing trading centre, an erstwhile French colony and is an important cultural site at the present. Born out of the Heritage Studies initiative undertaken by the Chandernagore College, the museum was set up to commemorate the legacy of the armed freedom fighters associated with the College and the city of Chandannagar. The museum also foregrounds the social, political, economic and cultural heritage of the city. It hosts a combination of displays, installations, photographs, sculptures, archival documents, illustrations, a traditional loom and a weaving machine.
Conflictorium - Museum of Conflict, Ahmedabad, is a participatory museum centred on conversations of conflict—social, political, cultural, and personal. Established in 2013, the museum resides in the erstwhile Gool Lodge in Ahmedabad. With emphasis on art, audience and archives, where intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to peace and conflict are explored, the museum tries to acknowledge the phenomenon of “conflict” as a key move in imagining a peaceful society. It has an accessible copy of the Indian Constitution, a long‑form wall timeline tracing major episodes of violence and resistance in Gujarat, a corridor of silhouettes of key nation‑making figures with archival speeches, a reference space with literature, a peepal tree that invites the public to write and hang apology notes.
Vintage Hub, Jorhat is a vibrant cultural place that brings together a variety of spaces: an archive, a gallery, a bookstore, cafe and publishing house. Located in the heart of Jorhat, Assam, Vintage Hub's primary mission is to conserve and disseminate resources related to the history of Jorhat and Assam, offering open access to both researchers and the general public. Vintage Hub holds photographic records from 1885, books on the city and its people, rare artefacts and heirlooms, historical maps, and more materials contributed by people from all walks of life. It also has an archive of audio-visual materials that serve as an important record of the city’s history.
Women of Vaastukala Archive is primarily located on the web and hosts oral histories of 21 women practitioners in architecture, design, planning, and allied disciplines, from across India. Announced as accessible in 2022, the archive was supported by the Graham Foundation, Chicago, and has emerged from a research project Revisiting India’s Architectural History: Tracing the Women Practitioners of Twentieth Century India. The intent is to record conversations with a wide range of women practitioners in varying positions across the built environment industry, map their journeys, and arrive at an alternate narrative about India’s architectural history post-independence. The archive is now supported and hosted by Curating for Culture, a collective focused on making invisible histories visible.
2024-2025:
Rani Abbakka Tulu Museum, Bantwal, is named after the queen, Rani Abbakka, who valiantly fought against Portuguese colonialism, the museum is a tribute to her legacy and the lush history of Tulu Nadu, dedicated to preserving and showcasing the rich cultural heritage of the region. Founded and curated by Dr Thukaram Poojary, the museum houses an extensive collection of artefacts and historical relics that tell the story of the region’s past. The museum also houses a library named after SU Paniyadi, a numismatics section, and an art gallery dedicated to Rani Abbakka.
Archives at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, is a public centre for the history of science in contemporary India. It has more than 350,000 processed objects across 50+ collections: paper-based manuscripts, negatives, photographs, books, fine art, audio recordings, scientific equipment, letters, and field and lab notes. The Archives has one underlying philosophy—of enabling diverse stories—and operates on four broad verticals: to strengthen research collections and access in the history of science in contemporary India; to push the frontiers of research in archival sciences in India; to build capacity and public awareness through education, training and programming; and to reimagine the archives as part of the commons through vibrant public engagement.
The Marg Foundation, Mumbai, was established in 1946 by novelist Mulk Raj Anand and is India’s oldest continuously published art magazine. The archive is particularly rich in its exploration of architecture, textiles, dance and performance studies, modernism in India, and painting traditions. The Marg Foundation, a non-profit organisation, also publishes illustrated art books that are internationally acclaimed for their high standards of production and excellent editorial content.
2023-2024:
Zapurza Museum of Art and Culture (ZMAC), Pune, is a not-for-profit art initiative under PN Gadgil Art and Culture Foundation led by Mr Ajit Gadgil. Borne out of Mr Gadgil’s personal collection, ZMAC has objects ranging from rare pieces of jewellery, paintings by traditional and contemporary artists, textiles, lithograph prints by Raja Ravi Varma, a collection of miniature paintings, manuscripts, everyday objects, and a range of ephemera.
The Cinema Resource Centre (TCRC), Chennai, is a not-for-profit public archive of Indian cinema designed to enable research on the visual and audio-visual cultural artefacts produced by Indian films over the last 80 years, especially those made in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. The collection at TCRC have been sourced from collectors, film producers, technicians, artistes, and fans. The materials range from film posters, lobby cards, song books, long-playing (LP) records, literature and review pieces on cinema, and thousands of film stills.
Ever-Living Museum, Shillong, is a private initiative owned and curated by Mr Kyntiewbor War. It is nestled in the village of Mawshbuit, and the collections and artefacts on display reflect the dedication of Mr War’s effort to preserve the region’s material culture and the priceless contributions of well-wishers. The diverse collections, from cultural artefacts of the various indigenous communities of the region, Stone collection and hundreds of native plants and unique flowers, allow us a glimpse into the culture of the region and its people.
Bastion Bungalow, Fort Kochi, is a historical monument that epitomises the varied poly colonial histories that inform Kochi’s past. Spread over about 10 galleries, the museum broadly covers a long history of the region such as: commercial and sea trade routes of ancient Kerala; ancient ports of Kerala, with references about them like Muziris Papyrus Scrolls, Ganeza Collections etc; trade and commercial relations with foreigners; ancient maps including the Tabula Peutingeriana; details about flora and fauna of the region from the 17th-century botanical treatise Hortus Malabaricus, and much more.
2022-2023:
Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP), Pondicherry, is a Franco-Indian research institute committed to the creation and stewardship of research archives across disciplines. Inaugurated in March 1955, the IFP operates under the joint supervision of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the CNRS, undertaking research in Indology, Social Sciences, Ecology and Geomatics with a strong focus on interdisciplinary collaborations. The archival collections at IFP have incubated new questions and inquiries, and challenged the idea of archives being frozen in time.
Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) Archival Project at NLSIU Bengaluru has materials that do not consist of stand-alone collections but are interconnected through the people who formed the queer movement. The collections contain raw video footage, photographs, newspaper clippings in multiple languages, legal documents, personal artefacts, and memorabilia of queer communities from the late 1980s to the early 2000s.
Bihar Museum, Patna, was inaugurated in 2015, with the central focus being the people of the state. It is built from the collections of the historical Patna Museum in the same city and houses artefacts from the region, aiming to make history accessible to its community and others. The museum is dedicated to indigenous arts, crafts and performing arts of the various regions of Bihar and intends to create a lasting educational impact on the children of Bihar and other visitors.
2021-2022:
Star of Mysore, launched in 1978, is a local English evening newspaper from Mysuru and is the only ‘subscribed’ eveninger in the country. Founded by KB Ganapathy and the late CP Chinnappa, the paper is published by the Academy Newspapers Pvt Ltd, Mysuru. The archive has copies of the physical newspapers printed from the late 1970s and digital copies of the online version.
The SL Bhatia History of Medicine Museum, Library & Archives, Bangalore, opened in 1974 and is housed in the first floor of the Museum Block in St John’s Research Institute. Named after Major General Sohan Lal Bhatia (1891-1982), the first Emeritus Professor of the Department of the History of Medicine in St John's Medical College, the museum brings alive the significant phases of the journey of medicine through a collection of medical instruments, models, photographs, paintings, and rare medical books.
The Museum of Christian Art (MoCA), Goa, was set up in 1994 in the Seminary of Rachol, in collaboration with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), New Delhi. The museum was later relocated in 2001 to the Convent of Santa Monica, in the vicinity of the UNESCO World Heritage site in Old Goa. It has a unique collection of objects that reflects the rich and pluralistic history of Goa.
2020-2021:
The Victoria Memorial Hall (VMH), Kolkata, was opened to the public in 1921. The brainchild of Lord Curzon, the then viceroy of India, it was dedicated to Queen Victoria. Known as The Taj of the Raj, the monument was immediately recognised as one of the finest examples of Indo-British art and architecture after it was completed. It has a collection of 28,394 artefacts and textual archival material encapsulating the history of the Indian subcontinent, beginning from 1650 AD.
The People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) is both a living journal and an online archive to record and bring to national focus the labour, livelihoods, languages, art, crafts, histories and cultures of rural Indians. It covers the complexities of rural India, with 833 million people, 780 languages, multiple cultures and unrivalled occupational diversity through video, still photo, audio and text articles.