The IFA's Curatorship Programme was initiated in April 2010 with the aim of progressing the discipline of curation in India. Since the programme's inception, IFA has collaborated with independent arts organisations and academic institutions, generating discussion, critical pedagogies and new modes of curation sensitive to different regions in India.

Initially, we collaborated closely with four organisations who we perceived as 'nodal centers' — KHOJ International Artists’ Association, New Delhi; Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi; Katha Centre for Film Studies, Mumbai; and the Association of Academics, Artists and Citizens for University Autonomy (ACUA) – each bringing a wellspring of experience and expertise to the programme’s examination of curatorial theory, visual art and film curatorial practice and exhibition policy in India. In these first two years, the programme was generously supported by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust.

One among many significant outcomes of the programme thus far is that of an MA in curation in the School of  Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University, whose curriculum has grown out of five ACUA-led workshops in diverse regions of India across 3 years, involving key practitioners and academics in the field in addition to emerging curators and researchers. In a concluding colloquium, the curriculum will be formally constituted, becoming India’s first MA programme in curation with a scheduled start date of 2014.

Building on the host of residencies, festivals, workshops, screenings and other events already delivered in partnership with our nodal centres, IFA is pleased to be introducing Museum Fellowship in collaboration with strategically identified public and private museums across the country.

Through these fellowships, we aim to provide emerging curators with opportunities to engage with the rich curatorial possibilities offered by museum collections while interrogating orthodox views about collections, their contexts, histories, and audiences. The fellowships are being initiated with the additional intent of providing conceptual support to museums in transforming public spaces that are oftentimes sites of passive education and nostalgia into exciting ones for mediating the contemporary and historical. In the first year of fellowships, IFA is seeking proposals from curators to work with the collections of our partner museums, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai and the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad.

Through this website, we are making available selected documentation of past activities delivered through our dedicated curatorial programme simultaneous to logging events and activities of our own and others' making connected with curatorial practice across visual art and culture domains.

For more information contact Rashmi Sawhney at rashmisawhney@indiaifa.org or Aileen Blaney aileen@indiaifa.org.