Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Ishita Shah is trained as an interior designer and an architectural historian. Over the last few years, she has been developing a community-based curatorial practice, which focuses on cultural preservation and creative collaborations across individuals, families, and organizations with an intention to deepen the culture for archiving in India and across South Asia. Her work is situated under the aegis of a self-founded collective, Curating for Culture. She is also a consulting archivist and/or curator at Pattani Archives, Glenmorgan Estate, and Shreyas Foundation. She also teaches across various programs and cities. Two critical projects that she has self-initiated are: Constructing Personal Archives, an incubation program for archival projects from across South Asia, and Women of Vaastukala Archive, a digital repository of oral histories of women practitioners from architecture, design, planning, and allied disciplines in India. Ishita has previously worked with Queer Ink to lay foundation for Queer India Archives as a consulting archivist, Biome Environmental Solutions Pvt. Ltd. to curate their recent publication, Biome Diaries: Ecological Architecture from India (2021), as well as collaborated with organizations like the National Centre for Biological Sciences, INTACH Bengaluru, Arthshila Ahmedabad, the Ministry of Culture India; to curate and develop a wide range of public interpretation projects. Before this, she was an educator and the coordinator of the UNESCO Chair in Culture, Habitat, and Sustainable Development at the Srishti-Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. She has also been the founding archivist and oral historian at CEPT Archives and worked with the Royal Institute of British Architects (UK), INSITE Magazine, SPADE India Research Cell, and Design Innovation and Craft Resource Centre. Ishita is also a Graham Foundation Grant recipient (2020), a Khoj CISA Fellow (2021), a former fellowship student and community member at The Alternative Art School (2022), and a TEDx Speaker (2024). Ishita is also a contributor to the Feminist Spatial Practices Group and a thematic Director at PATIO Network.
Revisiting India’s Architectural History: Tracing the Women Practitioners of Twentieth Century India This project traces the journeys of women practitioners from twentieth century India and maps their architectural contributions as significant landmarks in the larger narrative of India’s architectural history. Using oral history recordings, visual documentation, and storytelling tools, this project creates an open access archive, and contributes to the discourse about the relationships between gender and the built environment in India.
Constructing Personal Archives 2020 was envisaged and curated as a four-month long incubation program, where selected archiving projects have been mentored in related techniques and practices. Curating for Culture’s first self-published work, an archival compendium is conceptualised with an intention to memorialise the experiences from Constructing Personal Archives 2020.
I have been associated in setting up this project almost since its inception, in different capacities. From guiding the team for on ground activities to work in areas of preservation, record management and dissemination, to engaging with the family to address legal pursuits and inviting other collaborators as and when required. I have also been conceptualising and co/mentoring the Summer Internship Program since 2021.
In my capacity as an archiving consultant and architectural historian, I guided the team to setup information architecture for archival study and conducted key interviews or oral histories for the purpose of VA's upcoming publication(s) and dissemination activities.
The primary intention of this collaboration was to build capacity for the team at Britto Arts Trust, Bangladesh to archive their own work from over last two decades, address their concerns about curating archival content for public dissemination and using such practices for their upcoming exhibition-publication at the Documenta Fifteen, 2022. In this process, we were also interested in strengthening the culture for archiving and historical preservation across borders and learn from each other about the relationships between art, history and public engagement in the process.
Teaching courses in Research Methodologies and Critical Writing, across UG and PG programs at Faculty of Design; Thesis Guide and External Reviewer for graduating projects.