About this Event
In conjunction with the exhibition , architectural historian Shivani Shedde will examine a lesser explored aspect of Afro-Asian studies: meetings, congregations, conferences, assemblies that brought African, Asian, and South American activists together into new anticolonial formations beginning in the early twentieth century. Shedde considers how these assemblies were enabled through built forms—though rooms, parlors, halls, auditoria that precipitated new ideas of negotiation and radical visual cultures.
Shivani Shedde is an architectural historian of the non-western world who specializes in the social movements, cultural practices, and intellectual currents of anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the 2026-2027 Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania, where she is working on her first monograph Toward an Architectural Commons: Afro-Asians and Development after Empire. This work looks to a period of decolonization when activists built new institutions to pool resources, share knowledge, and exchange ideas from 1957-1989 and demonstrates how architectural production—drawings, writings, technical documents—enabled new forms of communing as activists engaged with these transnationally circulated artifacts to shape their shared postcolonial futures. Her work has won several commendations including the 2026 Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Award, the 2024 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Carter Manny Citation, as well as the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies also in 2024.
Support
This event is sponsored by the Katherine Stein Sachs CW'69 and Keith L. Sachs W'67 Expendable Program Fund.
Event venue & nearby stays
Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S 36th St, Philadelphia, United States
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