We are delighted to announce Modern South Asia: Photography based books exploring Modern Architecture in South Asia, a talk by Randhir Singh.

Date: 6 April 2025, Sunday
Time: 6:30 pm onwards

About:
Across South Asia, books on architecture tend to focus on the region’s wealth of traditional architecture, its colonial heritage or on the work of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. A select few regional architects, such as B.V. Doshi, Geoffrey Bawa and Charles Correa, have career spanning monographs providing a general overview of their work. Missing from this context are books that delve a little deeper into the actual buildings designed by these architects. An architect or student interested in Achyut Kanvinde’s seminal Dudhsagar Dairy would need to find the out-of-print 2017 monograph “Achyut Kanvinde Akar” in which the project is discussed over just 6 pages with a few archival photographs. For many other important architects, the situation is much more dire. There are no published books on Eulie Chowdhury or Kuldip Singh’s work. The same holds true for Jane Drew prize winning Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari. The work these architects have done will fade away unless a concerted effort is made to photograph them, to publish books and make them available.

The MSA series of photography based books looks to work in this space exploring modern architecture built in South Asia with a focus on buildings of historic importance. Each book will focus on a single project (or two related projects) allowing for an in-depth visual exploration of the project through contemporary photographs along with newly commissioned critical writing and architectural drawings. The series will be limited to architecture designed and built in the 20th century by regional and international architects.

Randhir Singh is an architectural photographer based in New Delhi and Barcelona. He has a Bachelor of Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. Over the last fifteen years, his photography practice has focused on issues related to architecture, modernism and the urban landscape. His work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London and Dundee, 2024), Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2022), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, 2022), Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi, 2022), Arthshila (Ahmedabad, 2022), Photoink (New Delhi, 2020), the Ishara Art Foundation (Dubai, 2019), the Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai, 2019), Dhaka Art Summit (Dhaka, 2018), Jawahar Kala Kendra (Jaipur, 2018) and the Pondy Photo Festival (Pondicherry, 2016). His photographs are a part of the permanent collection at MoMA.