Two decades of work towards building an integrated knowledge base on the Indian Fine Arts, Culture and the worlds of Cinema came to fruition with the global launch of osianama.com on Indian Independence Day, 15 August 2013. The virtual world of osianama.com together with the live Osianama Club Events, whose inaugural events take place on 23 January 2015, will establish multiple platforms for cultu
ral interactions and aims to transform the concept of a knowledge base into a vibrant daily force for public participation and its ongoing education. The free online search-engine has been established to help transform the perceptions of Indian and Asian civilizations within the hearts and minds of the Indian and global public, by falling in love once again with the rich diverse heritage of ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary art and cultural objects and forms. In its 1st phase (August – December 2014) osianama.com has focused primarily on Hindi and Bombay Cinema, the History of Indian Modern & Contemporary Fine Arts & its Market and the World of Books, Catalogues and Newspaper clippings over the last 300 years. These worlds have been integrated with other popular art forms, such as Antiquarian and Contemporary Photography, Print-making in all forms (e.g. magic, travel, advertisements, maps), Hand-made Crafts (e.g. masks, dolls, puppets, toys, calendar art), select aspects of Indian and Asian Antiquity (e.g. As an arts institution, the preoccupation with design has led to the integrating of Vintage & Classic Automotives - which are supreme examples of perfection in design and form. In this vast art/cultural object-centric site, where image and text creates a language as equals, the cinematic imagery when fully uploaded will cover all forms of film publicity material and memorabilia which will include more than 500,000 original artworks for the history of World cinemas. To facilitate a more meaningful and in-depth global comparison with Indian cinemas an equally comprehensive collection on Hollywood, European and Asian cinema has been amassed and archived. Also, one of the key knowledge bases which has been made public is the complete database (visual and textual) of every public auction transaction in the world since 1987 to the present day pertaining to Indian Modern & Contemporary Fine Arts. No other country has ever made such a knowledge-base freely available to its public. Osianama aims to make the jump from the vast world of “information” available online to the vast world of “knowledge”, by creating from scratch the underlying search world with the highest intellectual rigor which privileges the history, aesthetics and the educational relevance of the art / cultural object beyond all else, but with the democratic freedom of a vast non-judgmental ‘living’ archive and library. Welcome to osianama.com. Questions and comments regarding the website are welcome on [email protected]
