The Index is an artist-led, non-profit digital infrastructure for discovering, documenting, and connecting contemporary art across borders.
Developed by coculture e.V. in Berlin, it brings artists, curators, art technicians, cultural practitioners, institutions, and audiences into a shared digital environment. Beginning with Syrian artists and artworks as its first node and working model, the platform combines professional profiles, portfolios, biographies, CVs, media archives, artwork documentation, and searchable cultural data. It is being expanded to include resources, open calls, tailored opportunities, and new tools that help artists present their practices professionally and gain greater agency over how their work is found, contextualised, and shared.
The Index enables audiences and cultural professionals, including curators, researchers, universities, museums, festivals, and other institutions, to encounter artistic practices beyond established institutional, geographic, and market circuits. By mapping relationships between artworks, people, places, and cultural structures, it also serves as a resource for curatorial research, cultural analysis, and the development of programmes grounded in the realities of artistic communities.
More than a directory, The Index is conceived as a living cultural infrastructure: an evolving space for public access, professional visibility, cultural memory, and exchange. It pays particular attention to artistic ecosystems across the Global South and to contexts affected by conflict, censorship, authoritarian pressure, or institutional fragility, without reducing artists or their work to those conditions.
The platform is currently in protected preview and is entering its final development and public launch phase. Syria is the starting point, not the limit. Once the first node is fully operational, the same infrastructure can be adapted and governed together with artists and cultural actors from other contexts where artistic freedom, cultural continuity, and access to international networks are under pressure.
Vision
Art becomes public through infrastructures: archives, museums, universities, curators, publishers, festivals, databases, search engines, and increasingly, algorithms.
The vision of the index is to create a public-interest digital infrastructure in which artists and cultural communities have greater agency over how art is found, described, connected, and remembered.
Beginning with Syrian modern and contemporary art, the platform is designed to grow into a federated network of community-led cultural indexes. Future nodes may be developed with artists, curators, researchers, and institutions connected to contexts such as Sudan, Lebanon, Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, and others.
Rather than building one central archive that speaks for different communities, the index offers a shared technical and methodological structure that can be locally governed, translated, and adapted to different artistic ecosystems.
Lab Project
The Lab category features emerging project concepts exploring future artistic possibilities. These sketches represent coculture's exploratory spirit, highlighting innovative ideas awaiting development.
While realization isn't guaranteed, this space invites viewers to envision the potential of transformative art and cultural narratives.
Objectives
The current platform provides searchable access to artists and artworks through professional profiles, portfolios, biographies, CVs, media archives, contact pages, and filtering tools.
The next phase will expand the database to include dedicated profiles for curators and cultural institutions.
Museums, archives, universities, residencies, festivals, foundations, project spaces, and cultural organisations will be able to present their activities and share programmes, resources, events, and opportunities. Curators will be able to create thematic selections and new pathways through the platform.
The index therefore maps not only artistic production, but also the relationships and structures through which art becomes visible, interpreted, supported, and shared.
the index is a living archive of artistic production across generations.
Contemporary artists can create and maintain their own profiles, while coculture develops carefully researched profiles for selected late artists whose work remains important to modern and contemporary art history.
The platform documents artworks, biographies, CVs, media traces, artistic concerns, and professional trajectories. In doing so, it creates continuity between historical and contemporary practices without treating culture as something static or complete.
The archive grows through participation and remains open to revision, expansion, and new interpretations.
Through structured, artist-controlled profiles and metadata, the index makes it possible to better understand artistic ecosystems across locations, generations, art forms, themes, and professional fields.
This information can support curatorial research, academic work, institutional partnerships, cultural-policy analysis, and future public reports.
The purpose of cultural mapping is not to extract or rank data. It is to reveal relationships, absences, concentrations, and conditions within artistic fields, helping cultural programmes respond to actual practices and needs rather than assumptions.
Artists retain control over the information they publish, and sensitive data must be handled through clear privacy and ethical standards.
The current platform provides searchable access to artists and artworks through professional profiles, portfolios, biographies, CVs, media archives, contact pages, and filtering tools.
The next phase will expand the database to include dedicated profiles for curators and cultural institutions.
Museums, archives, universities, residencies, festivals, foundations, project spaces, and cultural organisations will be able to present their activities and share programmes, resources, events, and opportunities. Curators will be able to create thematic selections and new pathways through the platform.
The index therefore maps not only artistic production, but also the relationships and structures through which art becomes visible, interpreted, supported, and shared.
the index gives artists tools to build a serious professional presence while reducing some of the administrative, linguistic, and institutional barriers surrounding artistic work.
Planned functions include a personalised Opportunity Inbox, matching artists with relevant grants, residencies, commissions, exhibitions, open calls, training programmes, and resources through the platform’s profile and tagging system.
An AI-assisted Artist Office & Studio Assistant will help users prepare drafts and templates for project proposals, artist statements, artwork descriptions, funding applications, invoices, certificates of authenticity, budgets, letters of intent, contract templates, and professional communication.
Press Articles
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