The largest Archive & Library on the Indian Arts, Culture and the worlds of Cinema opens to the public with THEOSIANAMA.COM
22 January 2013: Theosianama.com, a dedicated online search-engine and educational content provider for the Indian & Asian Arts, Culture and the worlds of Cinema will be launched universally in its beta version before 14 March 2013 with free access to the public.
Theosianama.com will be released over four phases as the most integrated examination of the subjects insofar documented and researched, and made publicly available with a rigorous daily updating process. The online search-engine in its first phase will focus primarily on Hindi and Bombay Cinema and the History of Indian Modern & Contemporary Fine Arts, with the initial focus on the international public auction markets for the Indian arts over the past twenty five years. This will be integrated with popular art forms, such as photography, print-making, crafts (e.g. dolls, puppets, toys), calendar art, select aspects of Indian and Asian antiquity (e.g. miniatures, sculptures, thangkhas, Japanese armour & kabuto), plus the most comprehensive library including thousands of research materials from catalogues to letters to newspaper articles.
In this art object-centric site, there is a vast cinematic imagery, covering all forms of film publicity material and memorabilia including more than 250,000 original artworks, such as lithographic and offset posters, lobby cards, show-cards, song-synopsis booklets, photographic stills, handbills, hoardings, glass slides, scripts, costumes and the like, dating back to the Silent Era.
Close to 95% of all Hindi films produced have been covered in some form or other and efforts are ongoing to represent those remaining. The presence of Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and films from other regions of India representing Indian Regional Cinema are also growing on a daily basis. To facilitate a more meaningful and in-depth global comparison with Indian cinemas one of the largest collections on Hollywood has been amassed and archived, ranging from the great lobby cards of the early decades of Hollywood from the Leonard Schrader Collection to hundreds of iconic props and documents to an equally expansive collection on World cinema with foci on classic Polish and Japanese poster designs.
As of today memorabilia representing iconic personalities such as Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, ‘James Bond’, Robert De Niro, ‘Tarzan’, Elvis Presley, Beatles, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and a host of others will enjoy prominence in theosianama.com.
The History of Indian Modern & Contemporary Fine Arts, as seen from various perspectives will also be revealed on a new scale. In the primary phase the focus will be on sharing public transactions, wherein every auction conducted globally since 1987 has been documented in its entirety. With this launch, a deeper understanding of the Indian fine arts market will no longer be restricted to a privileged few, but will be made available for free to the public.
India will thereby stand to become the first country in the world to make available the full economic databank and history of the subject free of cost to the user. This access will provide the first essential context and hierarchy of information vital for an economic knowledge-base to emerge for the modern and contemporary arts.
As a result of the focus on the tangible and material nature of the objects, the way cinematic knowledge and arts education is perceived will radically change, opening up new paths to re-mould public aesthetic sensibilities and values. Additionally the fusion of text and image, object and data, hand in hand with the ‘virtual-physical’ union, will further enhance the potential of the knowledge base to evolve into a new educational base for the arts, culture and cinema.
Envisioned to alter the perception and study of India, theosianama.com is the effort of twenty years of institution-building, archiving, research and innovation by Neville Tuli and Osian's. Phase 3 & 4 will see these knowledge-bases become a core component of content for schools, colleges, universities and independent research institutions across the world, as a deeper global awareness of Indian & Asian Art, Cultural and Film Studies radically changes.
If India is to emerge as a global educational hub, it is imperative that it first takes the lead to become the center of research, knowledge and excellence. This archive will be expected to play a pivotal role, taking forward a new private sector momentum so as to inspire cultural & educational-infrastructure building.
In the months to come the virtual world of theosianama.com will create many synergies with the four major physical platforms of the Osian’s Group – the Auction House; the new Publishing & Design House (which will be launched at the World Book Fair in New Delhi next month); India’s first museum for the Arts & Film – Osianama at the Kila (to be launched in late March 2013) and Osian’s – Cinefan: Festival of Indian, Asian & Arab Cinema (annual event every July-August).
With this ‘virtual-physical’ synergy, a new daily living experience (via master-classes, seminars, workshops, conferences, exhibitions, auctions, live musical performances, book launches, film festivals etc.), will be created, where information can be converted into knowledge, thereafter evolving to inspire holistic education, with a focus on a daily learning experience.
The internet was commercialized over thirty years ago and took the world by storm becoming a global powerhouse of data accessed effortlessly. It is perhaps inconceivable to estimate the size of the network as every year a few hundred million web pages are added. Yet the educational credibility of information is still highly questionable and fragmented. Top quality and credible data for scholars, students and the general public, needs to be made easily available in new contextualized frameworks.
Theosianama.com will hopefully integrate data in a structured and cohesive manner for it to become a knowledge base, while ensuring a high quality due diligence so as to allow new understanding and experiencing of the arts, culture and cinema in the most innovative and creative manner, thereby placing learning at the heart of education. This will push the expectations from our educational and research models fundamentally.
Osian’s efforts towards preserving cinematic and artistic heritage have been unrelenting, despite financial difficulties faced during the last three years. Over the last decade more than INR 500 crores has been spent in building the library, collection & archive. To finally share it with the public is a major step in institutionalizing the ongoing creative infrastructure-building vision of Neville Tuli.
For further queries, please contact:
Gurneet Singh, Prana PR T 9999950703 E Gurneet.sahni@pranapr.com
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