The project
India-UK Creative Industries at 75: Opportunities and Challenges is an online AHRC and Innovate UK funded project that brings together artists and related user-communities in India and the UK across three strands from the creative industries: screen industries, live performance, and fashion.
Together, the artists will share examples from their crafts and engage in dialogue regarding the possibilities, challenges and resources that have affected their respective industries past, present and future, but with a particular focus on working through the COVID pandemic. The project provides a space for online networking and the creation of new collaborative short artistic outputs, particularly as India marks 75 years of independence in 2022.
The project will connect Indian and UK artists who will not have worked with each other before through an online network. The network aims to nurture cross-cultural dialogue to enable the participating artists to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges, opportunities and potential resources available to each other and to create new artistic outputs. The project brings 3 different yet related strands into conversation with each other during individual strand workshops and during our final project showcase.
Project outcomes
The 75th year of Indian Independence offers a fitting period to build on new opportunities and overcome challenges of the past, present and futures related to the India-UK creative economy. Thus, the outputs and impact of the project will include:
1. Engaging artists and user communities through online events.
The three workshops and the final two-day project showcase symposium will facilitate public exchange and dissemination of new ideas and current issues pertaining to the India-UK creative industries. Outputs arising from the workshops might well include: an illustrated manifesto, a podcast, an audio-visual presentation, a toolkit, a short audio-visual production to be hosted on the BCU website etc.
2. Project Website
The project website and associated social media will be used as a public-facing medium and a repository of information and networking possibilities for our India-UK artists and related user communities.
3. Policy Recommendations Document
To make our project findings useful for a wider community of industry professionals and user communities, we will produce a policy recommendations document that will focus on the challenges, opportunities and resource needs of the participants. This will be an open access illustrated document arising from the activities of outputs 1 and 2. The recommendations will be presented to key cultural stakeholders across the India and UK creative industries and related sectors. An A4 one to two pages summary of the document will be translated into 5 different Indian languages as identified by the artists so as to advertise the project and its findings beyond English language users (e.g. Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telegu). A free downloadable pdf copy of the report and the translated summaries will be available on the project website, with links shared via our project’s collective social medias.