India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) welcomes you to The IFA Archive! We are delighted to share on this website the arts and culture projects that IFA has implemented since 1995. Over the last two decades, IFA has supported projects across a staggering breadth of disciplines and genres. These projects which have had varied outcomes as books, films, performances, archival and educational material, and more, continue to reach a multitude of publics. Over the years, this material at IFA has grown to become a rich and valuable repository of a legion of artistic and scholarly engagements and reflections of India's lived experiences.
IFA is an independent, not-for-profit that supports practice, research, and education in the arts and culture across India. Set up as a Public Charitable Trust in 1993, IFA started making Projects/Grants two years later. After twenty years of supporting the arts and culture, we felt the need for the creation of an archive to house this material. The Archive aims to provide greater access to and understanding of the work of multiple voices – marginal, mainstream, silent, loud, hushed – from the larger linguistic, geographical, social, cultural, and demographical contexts of India. We believe that The IFA Archive will help not just researchers, scholars, and curators but also artists, writers, and others who have a keen interest in the arts to study, explore, and experiment with this material – with the potential to traverse new trajectories and discourses and also to reflect on their own practices.
As part of our efforts to showcase the IFA Archive and encourage conversations around archives, we organise public events such as Open House with grantees and project coordinators to reflect on the archival memory of their projects, and Date with the Archive, which invites artists from across disciplines to talk about their experiences of working with archives.
Please note that The IFA Archive is a work in progress. This online space currently holds the materials of projects supported by IFA from the years 2004 to 2018. Additionally, at the physical site of The IFA Archive, more materials from projects supported in these years are available for consultation. Both the online and physical spaces will be continually updated alongside the ongoing process of archiving. Please note that due to space constraints, for each Projects/Grants we have only put up a representative selection of the works online. The rest is available at the physical archive.
We are delighted that the Indorama Charitable Trust, spearheaded by Aarti Lohia, working towards social integration, national good, and public welfare initiatives has generously committed to support the building of The IFA Archive. Because of their unwavering patronage, the critical work facilitated by IFA is regularly made accessible to a wider public under a single platform at The IFA Archive.
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