Tag: India Art Architecture and Design Biennale 2023

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Indian Ink


Growing up in a newly liberalised India, I watched a lot of American sitcoms. Most shows were reruns of old seasons. The exception being the last season of Friends which aired only a day after the US release. It was through these shows that I learned to associate tattoos with a certain persona. And that persona was not remotely Indian or tribal.

It was only after I left the bubble of the community in which I grew up, that I learnt how tattoos were commonplace in rural areas of the country—especially family names and religious symbols like ॐ (aum). But it wasn’t as glamorous as the tattoos I saw on foreigners.

A few years ago, I learned about the Māori practice of Tā moko through a wonderful (and particularly rage-inducing) podcast titled Stuff the British Stole. Tā moko tattoos looked beautiful. That they held deep meaning and weren’t just superficial marks to look cool, made them even more majestic. No wonder the tattoo artist was considered sacred.

It’s funny how I was more aware of tattoo practices outside India than our own. Fortunately, that changed recently, during the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale 2023.

Much like the Polynesian countries where tattooing different parts of the body holds meaning, tribes in central India too ink themselves with meaningful patterns and motifs.

Godna: Digging into Tradition

Godna is popular in tribal societies, particularly in the areas of Rajanandgaon and Surguja, Chattisgarh, Dindori, Madhya Pradesh and Madhubani in the Mithila region of Bihar.

My investigation into Godna led me to this short film by Shivam Vichare that shows the materials and motifs popularly used in the Baiga tribe in Dindori.

Using kajal (soot collected by burning herbal oil) and needles, ladies mark their bodies at various stages of life. Girls from the community must have their foreheads tattooed as preteens to be accepted into the tribe. Tattoos on the chest are made post marriage and childbirth.

Mangala Devi explains the meaning of some of the motifs—a form of prayer for the individual and family’s wellbeing. One pattern for the chest represents the beehive. Just as the beehive is dripping with honey, so may the home be full of nectar. Diyas on the knees signify light in their lives. And the bull’s eye is for the wellbeing of the cattle, so that they may plough the fields.

Like the Baiga Tribe, the Bharia, Bhil, Gond, Kol and Korku tribes hail from central India—home to some of the world’s oldest prehistoric cave paintings.

Many of the motifs used in Godna and other folk art are elements from nature. Expressed in simple line art, these symbols were created by the earliest graphic designers.

On display at the Biennale were some patterns from the collection of Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (also referred to as the National Museum of Humankind, or Museum of Man and Culture) in Bhopal.

I don’t fancy myself ever having the courage to get permanently inked, but these patterns are beautiful and definitely worth ogling over. Enjoy!

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Studio Perfect

Somaya Sampat Studio

Packaging cartons collapsed into sheets line the lofts in our apartment—set aside for that dreaded day when we’ll eventually have to move out. Little nooks and corners stare at me. Some of the empty spaces immediately scream at us, “Look at how much space is wasted!”

Living in a rented apartment, we have little control over what modifications we can make. Certainly, with the way rents are rising, we wouldn’t spend our money revamping someone else’s home! But that doesn’t stop us from dreaming.

We snap pictures of ideas we like and save Instagram posts related to sustainable home improvement. Whether we’ll ever use them is anybody’s guess!

The Samatva pavilion at the India Art Architecture and Design Biennale 2023 was one such inspirational visual feast. On the outside, the pavilion was a stony medieval building. The entrances to the rooms within seemed to have been renovated in colonial-style arched doorways. But the exhibits within had a warm, welcoming feel.

Of the entire exhibition, spanning 7 pavilions, Samatva was the one that was the most intentionally designed, explaining to the layperson what the terms mean.

Site: an area of ground on which a building is constructed, historically occupied by male architects, contractors, workers, etc. but women have neem challenging this status quo.

“This side has day care facilities along with housing for construction workers.”

Studio: a space where an architect, artist, designer, etc. works, and that is often found in a state of disarray but always creatively stimulating.

“Our studio always smells of coffee and fresh ideas!”

And yes, of course, there was a map!

Binding all the exhibits was a common design element—the red dot.

We saw aesthetically set up studio spaces with glimpses of architectural work-in-progress. Intentionally messy, but true to their word, stimulating.

Below are some pictures we saved for later.

Hopefully, one day we’ll have a space we can call our own—when we can finally free up some loft space and get rid of those packaging cartons. A time when we can drill nails into the walls and put up all our artwork (and the two guitars we now have).

Will we find these pictures when we need them? Only time will tell!

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Space Matters

3D architectural site plan as a wall display from Somaya Sampat's Studio

For the past few years we’ve been looking to buy a home, and we’ve looked at numerous fancy flyers by builders. But nothing has ever caught our imagination. Year after year, all we’ve seen are towers of concrete, embellished with heat-trapping glass. These so-called modern constructions conveniently ignore the realities of climate change. The prospective home buyers are effectively going to live in ovens, necessitating the use of air conditioning, further compounding the problem.

We love open, airy spaces with ample natural light, and yet, these townships pack houses like sardines. Projects these days claim to include rainwater harvesting, just to hop on the green bandwagon. But few even venture close to recycling grey water from kitchen sinks. With every house invariably keeping RO water purifiers, it makes sense to collect the waste water from these appliances for sanitation use. There is also immense opportunity to use rooftops for solar energy. None of these ideas are earth-shattering. Indeed, many of them have been implemented in other parts of the country. But the big builders of Delhi-NCR seem to lack inspiration to truly innovate.

If only they’d hired (or taken inspiration from) the architects of the calibre featured in the Samatva pavilion of IAADB23.

The Sustainable Eco-Literate Architect

Revathi Kamath’s treatise on the sustainable eco-literate architect.

The pioneer of mud architecture, Revathi Kamath wrote in her treatise on the sustainable eco-literate architect:

The architectural mind needs to be aware of the mathematics of complexity and geometries of nature—Mandelbrot sets, Julia sets, Berkhoff’s bagel, Koch curves, Buddhist and Hindu Mandalas—the list is constantly growing. The immense beauty that is latent in the use of these conceptual tools needs to be appreciated and replace the simplistic dogmas of the “cleanlineists,” the functional packaging of commercial space in boxes, the squares and rectangles on Vaastu and Feng-Shui pandits, layouts of military camps and cantonments, imperial palaces, administrative centres and corporate parks.”

Humanity must seek inspiration from nature and build to sustain, instead of merely using and dumping resources indiscriminately.

Take Kankana Narayan Dev, for example. Hailing from Assam, the architect takes inspiration from traditional, sustainable methods of construction in her work.

Furniture and building blocks that incorporate bamboo.
One of Kangana’s homes made with bamboo.

While Kankana works primarily with bamboo, Goa-based Tallulah D’Silva‘s material of choice is mud.

Tallulah D’Silva’s homestay that incorporates mud for construction
Revathi Kamath’s studio featuring a hand-crafted mud wall.

Sustainability wasn’t the only theme of Samatva. So was social inclusion and designing with empathy—something commercial builders could learn from.

One project that caught my eye was Sandhya Naidu Janardhan’s slum redevelopment work.

Building With Empathy

Sandhya Naidu Janardhan’s design process while working on slum redevelopment.

While on our home hunting spree, we visited dozens of construction sites. We sat in lavish sales offices, browsed through glossy brochures, walked inside heavily decorated sample flats and watched the brokers point at realistic scaled model of the buildings. The sheer amount of marketing glitter around these projects was mind-boggling.

But when you’re redeveloping a slum, it’s not as glamourous. You likely won’t have access to the kinds of resources the builders have. It would have been easy for Sandhya to have just drawn some cookie-cutter plans and got them approved without anyone batting an eyelid. But she chose to involve the community in her design process. The hallmark of a good designer is to understand the needs of the user—in this case, the people who would eventually live in the spaces she’d design.

Low fidelity models made with paper and wooden blocks.

By far my favourite exhibit was the small models made with paper and wooden blocks. Proof that one doesn’t need fancy photorealistic models to communicate a vision. What is needed, though, is the willingness to perform sound user research.

Would any big construction company ever care for their customers as much? We’re yet to find one that does.

The image at the top is a display from Somaya Sampat, formerly Somaya & Kalappa Consultants (SNK), at the Samatva Pavilion of IAADB23.

This post is a part of a long-ish series on the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale 2023.

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Shaping the Built

Design in Bharat

India’s cultural history dates back to prehistoric days. Yet, when it comes to design, the world seems to consider Europe as the centre for excellence.

The India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale 2023 (IAADB23) was a welcome initiative by the Ministry of Culture to show the world (and more importantly, to Indians) what they’ve ignored (or perhaps wilfully tried to destroy, almost succeeding at it).

The initiative captured public imagination. From quirky installations to mind-blowing paintings, and from replicas of temples to modern art, there was something for everyone.

The Red Fort, with its sprawling lawns and numerous barracks was an appropriate choice. To house the cultural history of a nation as rich and diverse as Bhaarat, would have taken nothing short of a small army.

The entire showcase was divided into seven pavilions, each with appropriately beautiful names:

  • Pravesh (Doors of India), Rite of Passage.
  • Bagh-e-Bahar (Gardens of India), Gardens as universe.
  • Sampravah (Baolis of India), Confluence of Communities.
  • Sthapatya (Temples of India), Antifragile Alogrithm.
  • Vismaya (Architectural Wonders of Independent India), Creative Crossovers.
  • Deshaj (Indigenous Design), Bharat x Design.
  • Samatva (Women in Architecture and Design), Shaping the Built.

While the installations at Vismaya and Pravesh made it to Instagram reels, Deshaj was the one that I was looking forward to. But the pavilion that ultimately had the biggest impact on me was Samatva.

Samatva: Shaping the Built

Inside the Smartva pavilion, a signboard reads, “Caution: Women at Work.”

Curator Swati Janu introduced Samatva thus:

The root of the word Samatva (Sanskrit: समत्व) is sama (सम) meaning ‘equal’ which forms the essence of this exhibition and the reason why we showcase women architects here.

Historically and even today women have not been given the same opportunities and recognition as men in the fields of design, architecture and planning, be it in pursuing the profession or being widely published or invited to speak at panels.

Even before we entered the pavilion, we saw these graphics reminding us about the poor representation of women in architecture.

The information visualisation nerd in me, however, couldn’t help but appreciate how beautifully well the information was presented. Using nothing but coloured dots, the series of graphics showed the gap in gender participation in architecture. Yellow dots represented men, while red ones represented women. The saddest visualisation was entirely yellow.

Graphic depicting the gender gap amongst Presidents of Council of Architecture.

Since 1972, there hasn’t been a single non-male president of Council of Architecture.

As architect Amrita Nayak puts it, “Often women have to work harder to be ‘listened to’ by senior leadership, in comparison to men with similar expertise or experience.”

I have been fortunate to have been heard in my work environment. But Amrita’s experience is all too familiar in a social setting.

The picture gets somewhat better when it comes to recognition of women in architecture, with 12 red dots against 88 yellow ones. The Pritzker Prize is an international award given annually to recognise the contributions of a living architect.

“It took 26 men winning the coveted Pritzker Prize for Zaha Hadid to become the first female winner in 2004.” – Sonali Rastogi, Co-Founder and Principal Architect, Morphogenesis

Graphic depicting the gender gap amongst Pritzker Prize winners.

One reason why so few women have been awarded the prize is because there are fewer women who practice. 20 red dots to 80 yellow ones.

Beside the visual, another eerily relatable observation by Amrita reads, “As a practising architect, one often finds oneself walking into a room (or a site) where you are the only female present.”

Graphic depicting the gender gap amongst practising architects in India.

“As architects, we are meant to build inclusive spaces. Why did we not make an inclusive framework for society?”

– Jaya Nila, Architect and Founder, The Architecture Place, Bengaluru

Amongst this sea of yellow dots, one visual represents hope. On the graphic for the number of students of architecture in India, the sixty red dots outnumber the yellow ones—a fraction short of forty. A tiny fraction of blue comes in too, to represent the transgender section of society.

However, as academician and architect Rajshree Rajmohan points out, “One is studying/practising and at the same time grappling with social impositions and gendered expectations.”

Graphic depicting the positive gender gap amongst practising architects in India.

Equanimity is a concept that is rooted in Indian culture, but centuries of colonialism slowly eroded it. But hope springs eternal, and there are some signs of revival. We have a long way to go to rediscover our roots and I hope initiatives like IAADB don’t get restricted to quirky social media shorts but spark genuine conversations around design in Bhaarat.

This is the first of what will likely be a long series of posts dedicated to IAADB23, as I have just stumbled upon the treasure of memories in my digital archives. Stay tuned for more!

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The Bazaar Under the Dome

Chhatta Chowk, Red Fort, Old Delhi, India.

My only memories of the Red Fort are from school trips. And while India Gate, Qutub Minar and the Baha’i temple made quite an impression, I couldn’t quite remember anything about the Red Fort. Except that there was a very crowded market at the entrance that was a nightmare to get through.

So, when we learned that the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale 2023 was held inside the Fort, I got excited. Finally, an excuse to fill in the memory gaps. 

Turns out, there really wasn’t much to fill in!

Entrance to the Red Fort, Old Delhi, India.

The Fort looked plain, barren and empty. A mere shell, in comparison to the mighty and rich forts of Rajasthan. The only exciting part of the monument: the bazaar! 

Called Chhatta chowk (translation: covered bazar), the 17th century market had the typical souvenir stalls. Glittering jewellery and carved statues, fridge magnets and stoles. Each shop full of shoppers examining the items with keen eyes.

As we moved closer towards one of the shops, a long line of school students crossed our path. Holding hands and forming a file to ensure no one gets lost. None of them was one bit interested in the wares.

As we waited for the students to cross, my thoughts went back to our school trip. It was boring and tedious for us, but it must have been a hundred times worse for our guardians—the teachers who accompanied us on those trips.

Originally posted on Instagram on 1 April 2024, this post is part of a series where I attempt to reverse social media—to reclaim my life from other platforms.