GIFs that keep on giving — a look back at GIF IT UP India
By: Medhavi Gandhi
Tags: GIF, Remix, India, Openglam, English

How GIF IT UP encouraged India’s Open GLAM journey

GIF animation, GIF IT UP India, 2020

Collections at DAG

DAG World is a premier art gallery that was established in 1996 by Ashish Anand. Anand had the vision of gaining recognition for India’s modern masters, whose legacies had been lost to time and apathy in the absence of sufficient viewers, collectors, promoters, curators or scholars.

Their recent museum initiative is a part of DAG’s mission of institution building: making art accessible and part of our shared legacy, by creating cultural spaces for critical thinking, creative expression and dialogue. DAG has established three museums, with exhibitions dedicated to different topics of Indian culture.The Drishyakala in Delhi explores the development of Indian modern art from the 18th century onwards; the Eternal Benaras in Varanasi is a celebration of the city of Varanasi in art;and Ghare Baire in Kolkata showcases 18–20th century art from Bengal.

Between Drishyakala and Ghare Baire, over 1500 artworks have been allocated to the museum collections from DAG’s vast collection of Indian Art. While the entire art collection of DAG has been digitized already, digitizing archives of artists’ books, letters, and personal artefacts is an ongoing process.

Since DAG Museums is a fairly recent initiative (2019), the bigger question around open access at this stage was:

“Should we wait until we have established the institutional framework or should we start incrementally?”

The idea of GIF IT UP was well-timed, and would allow the institution to think deeper about opening up.

I spoke to Sumona Chakraborty (Deputy Director of the Ghare Baire Museum Exhibition) who made GIF IT UP India a reality.

Sumona Chakravarty’s work explores the role of art in society, testing its potential in building relationships and creating new visions for the future. She is the Founder of Hamdasti, a Kolkata-based artists collective, that has been working on Chitpur Local, a community-based art project in the historic Battola area of Chitpur Road. Her work is participatory in nature, engaging diverse communities over a long period of time and collaboratively intervening in public spaces. Sumona is a graduate of the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore, with a Masters degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She has been a Fellow in the ArtThink South Asia Program at Khoj, Delhi and at the Global Cultural Leaders Program, hosted by the European Union.

What was your initial motivation to host GIF IT UP?

One of the drivers for opening up collections is to make iconic works of Indian art a cultural currency accessible to all, and circulated widely in the public domain. Like a Starry Night, or a Mona Lisa, our museums have artworks that are integral to South Asia’s history and should be a part of our collective imagination. The initial idea was actually for our team to create GIFs or stickers that could be in the public domain, but when you introduced the idea of a GIF-making contest that opened up many more possibilities. We had also been trying to find ways to support a creative community around the museum. We felt that a museum should function as a platform for artists and cultural practitioners, and be a space for collective creation. We were developing various programs around this idea. GIF IT UP helped us marry the two goals.

“GIF IT UP was aligned to DAG’s mission of creating a shared public legacy of art. Through our museums’ initiative we have been able to make art accessible to a wider audience and now we are further deepening these engagements through our programs, online and offline. GIF IT UP demonstrated how art and art history can continue to be relevant in the present moment and continue to drive popular culture. Becoming the first institution in India to join the Open GLAM movement was also a wonderful takeaway and we hope to be at the forefront of the dialogue around open museums.”

— Ashish Anand [Founder & CEO, DAG]

Before hosting GIF IT UP, how aware were you about Creative Commons licenses? What about the senior leadership?

We were familiar with Creative Commons but did not have a detailed understanding of the various licences. Yes, we did review the implications of each license — we did not want to lose the ability to commercially reproduce the artworks in our own publications and memorabilia, and also ensure that the source/collections attribution was still linked to DAG.

What we were clueless about was, the platforms where we could publish these collections.

“What would be the implications of publishing on The Heritage Lab website or Flickr or Wikimedia Commons — or all three? We didn’t know much about this or where to find the information.”

It is usually very difficult to build a case for open access artworks in India. Did you face any challenges?

Opening up collections may sometimes feel very daunting — you can feel like you have many steps to take before you open it up- digitize, research, document, archive, improve your website, restructure your institution, etc.

So, our motivation for enabling remix and animation of artworks, and building a creative community was an easier entry point. This way we could look at the process incrementally — look at just a few artworks and weigh the benefits and risks of opening these up.

The bigger challenge was to choose the artworks.

How did you choose the artworks? Who was involved?

On behalf of the museum team, I reviewed our collection and created a long list. Some of the criteria were: featuring well and lesser known names; selecting artworks that have been published and circulated and hence were just one step away from becoming a part of the public domain; selecting artworks that could be easily edited and animated and had the potential for creative interpretation, including adequate representation of our favourite cat!

The selection was reviewed by Ashish Anand, and our Senior VP, Ritu Vajpeyi Mohan, who is anchoring the museums program in Delhi. I created a final list based on their feedback.

What has been the impact of GIF IT UP for DAG?

The more obvious impact has been the increased engagement beyond our social media bubble. We received entries from all parts of India (34 cities!), especially outside of the main cities. The balance of deep and wide engagement and growth of a museum community are just some of the immediate results we see.

Statistics from Talkwalker

What will be the way forward for DAG in terms of open access? Is there going to be a policy that will be developed?

We certainly want to make the art at the museums more accessible in the public domain for education, remix, reinterpretation. The modality of this is still an ongoing discussion, and the success of GIF IT UP will certainly be an important influence in these conversations.