First Phase Report – Fellowship Forschungswerkstatt 2025/26
“From Process to Aesthetic: Recontextualizing Modernism in South Asia through Cinema, Print and Object-Oriented Ontology”
In the first phase, our project has focused on tracing how modernist aesthetics travelled into everyday imagination in post-independence South Asia not only through architecture, but significantly through media such as film, magazines, advertisements, and visual print culture. Using an interdisciplinary approach between media philosophy and architectural history, we explore how modernist objects became symbols of aspiration, design vocabulary, and cultural identity in the domestic sphere.
1. Research Progress
Between July–October 2025, we conducted extensive archival research in India with the goal of collecting primary visual material and media references for analysis. We visited:
a) Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi) – surveyed design catalogues, post-independence art journals and visual documentation and National Film Archive of India – NFAI (Pune) – accessed film journals, stills, production design references, and cinematic material focusing on domestic interiors.
b) British Library and National Art Library, V&A (London) – archives on magazines, design archives, and material focusing on Print media correspondences.
c) Private Archive of Design Magazine (1957–1988) at 11 Amrita Sher-Gil Marg, New Delhi, courtesy of the Patwant Singh’s family. We received permission for academic use and digitisation, gaining rare material unavailable in other public repositories.
The collected corpus now forms the foundation of our visual lexicon of modernist domestic objects, to be expanded and systematized in the second phase of the project.
2. Dissemination & Academic Engagement
a) Sneha Singh presented at the international conference Times in Between (Bucanevis, Trieste, Italy, Dec 2025).
b) Pappal Suneja presented at European Society of Periodical Research at Málaga, Spain (2-5th Sept 2025) and participated in the Conference Socialism on the Bench Global Socialism and Non-Alignment, Pula (18-19th Sept 2025).
c) Together, Sneha Singh and Pappal Suneja presented the project at the IAAW South Asia Research Colloquium at Humboldt University Berlin (5th Dec 2025), introducing our theoretical frame and preliminary findings.
d) Our project website is now in the final stages of being constructed and operational.
3. Upcoming Activities (Jan–May 2026)
a) We are currently preparing an International Round Table (April 2026) with invited scholars working on visual modernity, design history, and South Asian media.
b) In March 2026, we will present our research explorations at Université Lumière Lyon 2, as part of the Bauhaus4EU exchange collaboration at Passages Lab under the supervision of prof. Martin Barnier.
c) The next phase includes:
i) Systematization of archived material & digital database development
ii) Comparative analysis of film/print representations
iii) Preparation of an article for ABE Journal – Documents/Sources section
iv) Final review and reporting before project completion in May 2026
In conclusion, the project is progressing well in research, archival findings, and dissemination. In the upcoming months will focus on analytical consolidation and publications.