AYESHA SINGH - Facade: Skewed Histories and Site Lines

The 2025 IAF Facade brings together two series of works, Skewed Histories and Site Lines, and draws from Singh's ongoing research on women's contribution to monumental and private architecture in India. Systematically overlooked and erased in our history books, the buildings are a testament to women's stories, against the idea of their passivity or silence.

In school, we are often taught perspective drawing by sketching a triangular road that tapers into a vanishing point with a horizon line running through it. This is not a neutral way of seeing the world — it brings some things into focus and obscures others. With the Facade work, Singh proposes that we have the ability to challenge this. What if there were many vanishing points, many overlapping histories and intersecting narratives? What if there were many shifting perspectives or altered horizon lines?

This work layers the stories of five women, who as patrons and architects, shaped Indian architecture over the past millennium. The vanishing points in Singh’s design can be thought of as ideological prescriptions through which their histories along with their buildings flip, splice and overlap. When seen as the foreground of the work however, the photographs expand and stand upright, affirming their existence and lasting importance. Articulating their overlooked pasts enables us to honor their powerful presence 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 the facade pays homage to the work of five visionary women, we also recognise the countless women who have and continue to shape our constructed landscapes. This includes those who have built their own homes, started new practices, or contributed to creating spaces—even if they may never hold the formal title of ‘architect’. Their contributions endure.

Built in 11th century (either 1032 or 1063 CE, discovered c.1940s, restored c.1986)

Queen Udayamati

Queen’s Stepwell (Rani ki Vav) | Patan, Gujarat

Stepwells have long been public spaces where women congregate, worship goddesses and collect water. Inscribed with Queen Udayamati’s name, Rani ki Vav is one of the earliest stepwells in Gujarat known to have female patronage. The inscription marks her intention to be remembered, without which, her existence and work would have been lost to history. New research also challenges earlier assumptions that the stepwell was constructed as a memorial by the Queen for her late husband. This commonly perpetuated and narrow reading of her life exposes motivations symptomatic of how history has been written so far.

“Of the several hundred stepwells that have been excavated, around 25 per cent were actually built by women… who hoped to gain religious merit and possibly immortality through the gift of water.” — Purnima Mehta Bhatt in Her Space, Her Story: Exploring the Stepwells of Gujarat, 2014

Built between 1569-70

Bega Begum, or Haji Begum (1511-1582)

Humayun’s Tomb | New Delhi, Delhi

Humayun’s Tomb is the first garden-tomb in the Indian subcontinent and regarded as the archetype for future Mughal mausoleums to come. Its patron, Bega Begum commissioned and supervised its construction in memory of her late husband, Emperor Humayun. She worked with a team comprising of Persian artisans and craftsmen who she brought to Delhi from her Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, local masons and chief architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas. Bega Begum stayed back in Delhi to complete the project even after Humayun’s heir, Akbar moved the Empire’s capital and harem to Agra. Besides the grand mausoleum, where she is now buried, the Begum is also credited as a patron for education and for the madrasa in the Tomb compound.

Built in 1822

Begum Samru, born Farzana Zeb un-Nissa, baptised as Joanna Nobilis Sombre (1753-1836)

Basilica of Our Lady of Graces | Sardhana, Uttar Pradesh

Born Farzana and orphaned at a young age, Begum Samru worked as a nautch (dancing) girl, before she inherited the principality of Sardhana from her husband Walter Reinhardt Sombre. She ruled it until her death in 1836, commanded the mercenary army and strategically navigated complex political landscapes between the Mughal and British, to retain power over her own territory. When she was baptised as Joanna, she became the first and only native Catholic ruler of an Indian Princely State. She contributed to art and architecture throughout her life. The neoclassical Basilica in Sardhana, on the IAF facade, dedicated to Mother Mary is one of three surviving buildings commissioned by her.

“[The Begum was building] various spaces for worship for Hindus, Muslim, Catholics and Protestants… Her contribution to architecture is “suggestive of her cultural ambidexterity”...”— Alisa Eimen in Reading Place through Patronage: Begum Samru’s Building Campaign in Early Nineteenth-century India, .

Built in 1961

Urmila Eulie Chowdhury (1923-1995)

Government Home Science College | Chandigarh, Punjab

Holding the title of many firsts, Urmila Eulie Chowdhary is one of the first qualified woman architects in Asia, having completed her architecture degree in 1947. She is also the first woman to lead the urbanisation of cities in post-partition India as the Senior Architect for Chandigarh, overseeing the city’s second phase of planning, after being the only Indian woman architect and one of only two women architects alongside Jane Drew, in its first phase as part of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh team. Chowdhary was also the director of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi in the mid-sixties, the first Indian school of architecture to have been headed by a woman, even if briefly.3 She undertook a few architectural projects out of which the Government Home Science building is one.

“Chowdhury generally followed Le Corbusier’s concepts and scale in her building designs, exemplifying the principles of geometric compositions and honesty of materials.” — Madhavi Desai in Women Architects and Modernism in India: Narratives and Contemporary Practices, 2016

Built in 1996

Revathi Kamath (1955-2020)

Kachi Kothi, also known as the Mud House | Anangpur Village, Surajkund, Haryana

With more than 500 projects to her credit, Kachi Kothi is Revathi Kamath’s first building constructed for herself and her family by combining traditional mud architecture techniques with contemporary architectural design, a style of which she is now considered a pioneer. Kamath's work spans various other materials too, and in 1981 she founded an architectural practice with her husband, Vasant. While they created projects separately where her contributions are distinct and recognizable, the press often misattributed her work to him early in her career.

“What she disliked so much about Indian modernism after independence was what she describes as its brutality….“Working with raw earth is about,” she says, a “biological relationship of the human being with the environment”.” — Mary N. Woods in Women Architects in India, 2016

Download information fold in English, Hindi and Urdu

Activation (view here)

Ingredients of Encounters: Dismantling Site Lines

Carefully attend

a floating site

a live arc-hive

of fragmented trajectories of the present.

Ayesha Singh and Jyothidas K.V. respond to the IAF facade by hosting fleeting gatherings, extending the drawn lines to lines of poetry, readings, conversations, and ephemera. Encountered as a participatory performative picnic, this archiving exercise looks to engage, capture, and share questions that form the construction of our perspectives.

Supported by

MASH Foundation and India Art Fair

Photo Credits

Sonal Sood (Humayun’s Tomb), Kavya Jain (Government Home Science College) and Ayodh Kamath (Kachi Kothi)

Final Facade Images

courtesy IAF and photographer Jeetin Sharma

Credits

The artist would like to recognise the contribution of people without whom this work would not have been the same: Abhimanyu Dalal, Abhiviraj Dev Singh, Adishree Singh, Akshita M. Bhanj Deo, Amarjit Kumar, Anica Mann, Anushka Rajendran, Anwar Thikedar, Aparajita Jain, Arjan Duggal, Mohd Atif, Ayodh Vasant Kamath, Bamby Singh, Debalina Roy, Fazal Ahmad Faruqui, Himanshu Kulshreshtha, Jaya Asokan, Jyothidas K.V., Kanchi Jain, Maanav Jalan, Madhavi Desai, Maithili Raut, Martand Khosla, Md Ajhar, Md Arman, Md Faiyaz, Md Kari, Md Mahbullah, Md Muntazir Alam, Md Samir, Md Sanjar, Md Shamim, Md Shanawaz, Mehmood Alam, Munazir, Neetu Advani, Peter Nagy, Rahul Lamba, Rajkosor, Ritu Kumari, Sanjana Jain, Sapna Desai, Sarovar Zaidi, Satinder Singh, Shamsher Alam, Shivam Talwar, Sonal Sood, Srishti Sainani, Sumeet Mitroo, Suresh Mahto, Tanya Munjal, Tarika Khattar, Umah Jacob, Vatsala Sethi, Vidisha Aggarwal

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