Curating Experiences

In the ongoing research project, Revisiting India’s Architectural History: Tracing the Women Practitioners of Twentieth Century India, the intent has been to converse with a wide range of women practitioners in the architecture, design, planning, and built environment industry, map their journeys using oral history recordings, and arrive at an alternate narrative of Indian architectural history post-independence. The Archive consists of stories of 21 women.

Tracing the livelihood histories of Malabar began with the humble intentions of telling the story of Germany’s influence in shaping the cultural landscapes of Kozhikode. However, the story of Kozhikode - the first City of Literature in India, and one of our oldest trading ports - is not merely shaped by its political crossovers or the trauma of its long-forgotten past. There are strong undercurrents of lived experiences about toiling for survival, building new camaraderie, and renewing identities that are spread across the region.  

...so far, three editions of this homegrown program have been conducted with participation from across South Asia.

CPA is a nine-month-long incubation program for aspiring archivists, artists, researchers, and community members who want to make an invisible history more visible by building micro archives, reimagining access, and including voices from the community.

 To know more, we invite you to explore further ... 

This workshop aims is to create a safe space for community members to share their lived experiences and personal health histories, enabling them to voice their narratives and contribute to a people’s medical archive. The workshop will introduce inclusive and accessible ways to archive health histories, be it personal incidences, family history, or community narratives. By curating these stories, the workshop aims to provide the readers with a deeper understanding of the cultural, social, and human dimensions of health and illness. This approach moves beyond clinical facts and figures, allowing the medical fraternity and larger audiences to develop greater empathy and cultural competence; ...

In Dec 2023-Jan 2024, at the month-long exhibition and the Public Launch of Pattani Archives in Bhavnagar, we curated a range of exciting ways for storytelling. 

The research and curation of the exhibition have been a roller coaster ride for over a year. From meeting the right minds to finding a creative rhythm, on-site surprises, understanding the regional patterns, commitment to ideas, or making sense of the historical narratives... 

Bangaloreans (or Bengalureans) we invite you to bring your personal archives and initiate experiential conversations about your neighborhood in the city. Under the umbrella curatorial of “care in construction”, we are hosting a public exhibition of all such stories from the neighborhoods in Bangalore and unpacking the ongoing sociopolitical narratives of belongingness. 

‘Kitchen to Kacheri’ was an engagement-based exhibition curated by Ishita Shah, as a part of the umbrella exhibition ‘this will keep you warm’ - 12 curated exhibitions for the Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) Fellowship 2021 - a key program by Khoj International Artists' Association and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi in March 2022 at India International Center, New Delhi. 

This archive will serve as a safe space for anybody to share their experiences and emotions in anonymity. We want to collect, care for and preserve these experiences so our histories of these times are not forgotten and erased in the future. 

Curating for Culture is one of the six fellows from India in 2021, who have been selected to further their research projects using technological explorations at Futua Tropica. FT is an intertropical network of grassroots local networks for the lateral exchange of other forms of knowledge, designs, and technologies. It uses the IFPS protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogota (Colombia), Kinhasa (DR Congo), and Bengaluru (India).  

An exposure initiative, the intention is to open an archival project to the public at large and expose its creative processes. We invited a wide range of practitioners to share their experiences, such that people from different walks of life can relate to the subject of archival interpretation and curation. 

Lab Culture: life beyond sciences, was a two-part exhibition curated in June 2019 and Sept 2019. The intention of this exercise was to bring forth the nature of life and work at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) through the intersection of art, design, history and science. 

Design Dialogues is a series of monthly  public engagements intended to bring trans-disciplinary practitioners together, in conversation with people from all walks of life. These conversations are anchored around different cultural issues and its changing interpretations across various creative practices. Design-ed Dialogues is being co-curated with Public Space Designer Rahul Bisht, to ensure a wider reach via digital dissemination.