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 2026.
The grant aims to:
- Encourage the use of innovative methodologies to identify, document, research, and annotate visual and cultural print materials in regional languages across 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.
GRANT FOCUS FOR 2026
We invite proposals that interrogate how visual and cultural print materials of different kinds—books, journals, magazines, broadsheets, posters, pamphlets, books, ephemera, etc.—contributed to, constituted, and were embedded in the cultural politics of a historical moment. Preference will be given to proposals that focus on materials in regional languages that are not reachable or are out of circulation, and are not easily available or located in public collections, with an intent to make these materials accessible to the best extent possible, and in meaningful and productive ways.
The areas of research may include, but need not be limited to:
- Social or political movements that extended to print culture, and the visual, literary, and political histories therein.
- The intellectual contribution of artists, activists, poets, writers, editors, designers, or publishers who played an important role in the evolution of print and visual cultural materials, and the debates involved.
- The movement of ideas about art, literature, poetry, aesthetics, and cultural practices within print culture, and as they occur through translation across languages and contexts.
Deadline for Applications: 31 July 2026
Duration of Grant: 1 September 2026–31 August 2027
Grant Amount: Up to INR 3,00,000
For more information, see here: https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/open-call-for-ssafaaa-research-grant-for-archiving-histories-of-art-ideas-and-visual-culture-2026