SKEWED HISTORIES AND SITE LINES — IAF 2025 FACADE, BY AYESHA SINGH, SUPPORTED BY MASH
The 2025 India Art Fair Facade brings together two series by Ayesha Singh, Skewed Histories and Site Lines, and draws from the artist’s ongoing research on women’s contribution to Indian architecture. Spreading 468 ft across and up to 40 ft tall, the installation stands against the erased legacy of India’s women architects and patrons, and the dominant assumption of women’s passive role in the creation of the country’s urban infrastructure.
As an artist who has worked with architectural concepts, scale and materials throughout her career, Singh seeks to skew how we look at our built environments and history. “In school, I was taught to draw in perspective through a sketch of a triangular road that tapers into a vanishing point,” the artist explains, referring to Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s still presiding definition of single-point perspective from 1420. The 2025 IAF Facade breaks with this convention to make visible the stories that are obscured by rigid notions of perspective. “What if there were many vanishing points, many overlapping histories and intersecting narratives? What if there were many shifting perspectives or altered horizon lines?”
In the work, photographs of buildings made possible by five women who, as architects and patrons shaped Indian architecture over the past millennium— Queen Udayamati, Bega Begum, Begum Samru, Urmila Eulie Chowdhury and Revathi Kamath — are set within Singh’s sight lines. The vanishing points in her design can be thought of as ideological prescriptions, through which their histories along with their buildings get sliced, turned and cut apart. When seen as the foreground of the work however, the photographs expand and stand upright, affirming their existence and lasting importance. The artist offers us a reorientation, making visible the abiding influence of women in our cities and our histories. Singh reminds us, “we have to reiterate the existence of multiple truths over and over again until our history is written differently.”
While highlighting five women in particular, the work recognises the countless women who have and continue to shape our constructed landscapes, including those who may not hold the title of ‘architect’ but who have built their own homes, started new practices or contributed to creating spaces. Their legacy endures.
