On Friday at 3 pm, a group of us from Bangalore (Arun, Gautam and I) organised a GLAM presentation and meeting at the NGMA (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore http://ngmaindia.gov.in/ngma_bangaluru.asp) with Liam. (Announced here: http://wikimedia.in/wiki/Projects:GLAM_2011/Bangalore_Feb2011)
This is a quick update:
NGMA is a grand Indian art institution, and the Bangalore museum is it's latest expansion. The director of the museum, Sobha Nambisan, was keen to make this a small meeting for NGMA staff and invited curators/ gallery owners from Bangalore. Of the people present, other than us, there were about 10 NGMA staff, including all the main curators and coordinators, as well as Aashti Mudnani from Gallery SKE (www.galleryske.com) - a leading contemporary art gallery, Suresh Jayaram from 1 Shanthi Road (www.1shanthiroad.com), - an arts centre for residencies and experimentation, Suman Gopinath from Colab - curatorial space for arts and architecture, and Namita Malhotra from Pad.ma (www.pad.ma) - an open video archive.
Liam spoke for about half an hour about his experiences at the British Museum, interspersed with questions from the curators present. Following his talk, we had a discussion that lasted another half hour. There was plenty of interest evinced in continuing similar work in Bangalore at the institutions present; questions ranged from fairly interesting ("What can I get out of this?") to the expectedly basic around tenets of Wikipedia - as is perhaps to be expected from a specialist audience in a different field. Gallery SKE, for instance, is already working in-house on looking at ways of enhancing Wikipedia around the artists it represents; 1 Shanthi Road, which is a far looser arts-space, expressed interest in finding ways to document events, happenings and art that might otherwise be lost, and NGMA as a whole - as expressed by Sobha - seemed very interested in following up the conversation, by starting to think about what they would want to get out of a relationship with Wikimedians.
Personally, it was very interesting for me to see the intersection between high-culture and Wikimedia, a connection that's not often expressed or articulated in Bangalore or India. Gautam and Arun, who were both at the meeting, have suggested that they could follow up in terms of coordinating community involvement with NGMA and other art galleries present at the meeting, especially in terms of interest expressed at the public CIS meet-up where Liam also spoke.
If there is anyone on these lists who'd like to get in touch with any of the institutions mentioned here, please drop either Arun, Gautam or I a line and we'll be delighted to connect you :)
Cheers, Achal