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:
Uday Dikshit, Prana PR T 9810922830 E uday.dikshit@pranapr.com
Gurneet Singh, Prana PR T 9999950703 E Gurneet.sahni@pranapr.com
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