This collection was made by four members of the Curating for Culture team: Ishita Shah, Vedika Kaushal, Fiona Evangeline and Anshula Prehar, who work alongside Shristi Sharma, and Ulhas Shelke. It was made as a post-rationalisation of the curatorial process for an exhibition called Vandalising the Indian Atelier: a search for stories of women practitioners organised by Curating for Culture in 2023 and shown at Arthshila Ahmedabad. The curators’ notes can be found here.

As the curators say in their introduction to the exhibition, it was curated to

explore the changing relationship between women practitioners in architecture, design, planning, its allied disciplines, and the Atelier.

They continue:

The ever-lasting image of the Atelier in post-independent India has been very urban, male-centric, and mostly a clean, white, well-defined space for architectural production suggestive of no room for errors or flexibility in its ways… very much like this space before the exhibition was hosted here! This perception of an atelier begins at the architectural school and manifests into a design studio almost a decade later.

This was the first public exhibition curated by Curating for Culture from their ongoing research project on tracing the journeys of women practitioners in India’s 20^th-century architectural history. The research has manifested into a digital archive – Women of Vaastukala, and will continue its promise of recording oral histories and making the unseen archives more accessible to tell the stories of Indian women practitioners from architecture, design, planning, and allied disciplines.