research grant for archiving visual culture

The Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF) and Asia Art Archive (AAA) in India are pleased to announce the SSAF–AAA Research Grant for Archiving Histories of Art, Ideas, and Visual Culture 2025.

This grant, which marks the seventh year of collaboration between SSAF and AAA in India, emerges from AAA’s ongoing efforts to digitise, document, and make publicly accessible recent histories of art in the region by deploying a range of innovative archival practices and research methods. This grant is in line with SSAF’s commitment to work with cross-disciplinary initiatives that address the often difficult and sometimes endangered conditions of informal archiving, the challenges posed by the fugitive political conditions of their assembly and use, and the possible links of such materials with alternative and heterodox practices in the arts and in intellectual work.

The grant aims to:

• Encourage the use of innovative methodologies for purposes of identifying, documenting, researching, and annotating visual and cultural print materials in regional languages within India.
• Open up research avenues into wider discursive fields, specific regional milieus, and the politics of image-making and their circulation.
• Help foreground creative modes of interpreting and engaging with materials that emerge from a recognition of their contextual significance, which in turn could result in the creation of an archive that transforms our existing understanding of the field.
• Support projects that consider both the long- and short-term outcomes of making such materials publicly available, and suggest possible strategies for the same.

Applicants are encouraged to suggest new connections between print cultures, intellectual histories, the visual arts, and social, political, and cultural movements; lay new trails for unpacking the archival materials developed under the grant; and explain the objectives and intent of their research.