This multilogue brings together ADFF’s curatorial theme, Mumbai Transcripts, with Avid Learning’s Icons of Bombay series to explore how Mumbai’s spaces are shaped by the daily movements, habits, and experiences of the people who occupy them. Turning to Mumbai in the present day, this programme examines what its everyday rhythms, flows, pauses, negotiations, and routines reveal about the city’s changing social and cultural realities. Icons of Bombay has examined these dynamics through the city’s familiar sites and symbols, while the pavilion installations at ADFF offer new interpretations of public experience. Together, they provide a framework for understanding how design, art, and storytelling can respond to real urban conditions and to the ways people continually remake the city through their actions and interactions.
The conversation will bring together perspectives from architecture, visual culture, filmmaking, urban history, and everyday practice to discuss how Mumbai’s lived patterns can guide more attentive, inclusive, and imaginative approaches to designing and interpreting the city. In this light, architecture becomes a way to observe how the gap between planned form and lived use unfolds across Mumbai. Rather than treating design as fixed, this approach sees it as something shaped by the people who move through it, allowing their actions and encounters to suggest new spatial narratives for a city that is constantly rewriting itself.
Aric Chen is a curator, writer and Director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the London-based cultural foundation established by the late architect Dame Zaha Hadid. American-born, Chen previously served as General and Artistic Director of the Nieuwe Instituut; Professor and founding Director of the Curatorial Lab at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai; Curatorial Director of the Design Miami fairs in Miami Beach and Basel; Creative Director of Beijing Design Week; and Lead Curator for Design and Architecture at M+, Hong Kong, where he oversaw the formation of that new museum’s design and architecture collection and program. ‘ Chen is the author of Brazil Modern (Monacelli, 2016), and has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Wallpaper, Architectural Record, and other publications.
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Shimul Javeri Kadri is the founding partner of Mumbai-based SJK Architects. Drawing from studies of climate, cultural histories, and technology, her practice meticulously crafts contemporary built environments that are relevant and exciting for the vibrant Indian context. Over more than 30 years, SJK Architects has delivered 110+ award-winning projects across the length and breadth of India. Notable works include the Nirvana Films’ Studio in Bangalore; Automobile Design Studio in Mumbai for Mahindra and Mahindra; the Dasavatara Hotel in Tirupati and the Hotel in Bodh Gaya; an apartment building at Boat Club Road in Chennai; the Rural Multi-speciality Hospital for the JSW Foundation in Alibaug; and commercial projects and brand identities for clients such as FabIndia, Penguin Random House, Tata Taneira and Reliance Portico. Significant ongoing commissions include the Museum for Jain Heritage in Koba; Public Pavilions in Palitana; and the expansion of S. R. University in Warangal. Shimul’s work has been published widely and has accrued considerable Indian and international acclaim, including two wins at the World Architecture Festival Prize (Singapore) in 2012, the Futurarc Green Leadership Award (Singapore) in 2012, The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture & Design (USA) in 2016, the Prix Versailles Award (France) in 2016 and 2022, The Merit List in 2021, JK AYA Award in 2023 and nine awards from the Indian Institute of Architects and Indian Institute of Interior Designers. One of their projects has recently been selected for the UIA Guidebook for the 2030 Agenda for advancing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. SJK Architects has also been on Architectural Digest India’s AD50 and AD100 lists for 10 consecutive years. Shimul is on the Advisory Committee for Gender at the MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai), which has led to the incorporation of the first chapter on gender in the Development Control Rules of Mumbai 2034. She also serves as a Trustee for Akshara, a women’s resource centre, as well as for Vipla Foundation, where she has been actively steering education and women’s projects. In 2014, for her contribution to architecture, Shimul received an honour from the prestigious ArcVision Prize (Italy) – the “Pritzker Prize for women”.
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Pronoti Datta is a writer and communications specialist living in Mumbai. A former journalist, she has worked at The Times of India and Time Out Mumbai. And her writing has appeared in publications such as The New Statesman, Roads & Kingdoms, Mint Lounge, The Hindu and Vogue. She's the author of two books: the novel 'Half-Blood' (2022) and the non-fiction work 'In the Beginning there was Bombay Duck: A Food History of Mumbai' (2025).
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Robert Stephens is an architect who loves to write. In 2007, he left his childhood hometown of Summerville, South Carolina and moved to Mumbai, India where he lived and worked for 16 years. Bombay Imagined, An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City is his first book, published by his homegrown studio, Urbs Indis. After relocating to Bengaluru in 2023, Robert expanded the creative work of Urbs Indis to include an independent architecture practice. The firm’s first built project, the Urbs Indis Library & Garden, is a home-studio-library where Robert lives with his wife, son, cat and dog. The off-grid space houses more than 1,000 rare books on urban India, with more than 400 publications dedicated to Mumbai. The collection is publicly accessible six days a week, and the space hosts a range of events throughout the year, including architectural walkthroughs, illustrated talks, and most recently, the launch of the Bombay Imagined second edition in December 2025.
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Asad Lalljee is SVP, Essar Group, CEO of Avid Learning, a public programming initiative and creative platform under the Essar Group, and Curator of the Royal Opera House, Mumbai. Asad brings several years of advertising, publishing, marketing, and business development experience, both in international and domestic markets. Prior to relocating to India, Asad worked for 14 years as one of the ‘Mad Men’ advertising executives on New York's Madison Avenue. He was with McCann-Erickson, and earlier with Hill Holiday, a subsidiary of advertising giant IPG. Under Asad’s leadership, Avid Learning has distinguished itself with a wide variety of arts and cultural programming and is currently India’s leading cultural hub. AVID has grown its curatorial practice by leveraging international cultural collaborations through the diplomatic core and partnering with the existing ecosystem by creating opportunities at some of the country’s largest cultural platforms including Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), The Serendipity Arts Festival and The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. In 2022, Asad was co-opted as a member of the Kala Ghoda Association’s Executive Committee. He has been appointed as a member of the advisory board of the Mumbai Urban Art Festival for the year 2022-2023. In 2016, Asad was appointed curator of the newly restored Royal Opera House, Mumbai for which he has successfully designed an avant-garde series of programs. With Asad’s guidance, the Royal Opera House, Mumbai has re-established itself as a performance space of international quality, a cultural venue par excellence, and a prime example of restored and renewed city heritage. In 2018, Asad was inducted into the prestigious FICCI Art and Culture Committee as a distinguished member. FICCI is the largest and oldest apex business organization in Indian business with a glorious history of nine decades. Asad has co-convened foray conferences for FICCI’s Smart Cities, Art Cities IP in Mumbai, and Bengaluru. In April 2020, he launched AVID ONLINE as a response to the pandemic and successfully presented 240 programs by March 2021. His curatorial choices demonstrate his passion for technology and new media. After introducing the Mumbai audience to the world of NFTs, Asad took Avid Learning to New York, where he kicked off Engendered, New York’s three-week-long exhibition by moderating a panel discussion on ‘State of the Contemporary: NFTs and the Global South.’ It was followed by moderating the opening session of Jaipur Literature Festival’s, New York edition: ‘Digital Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and the Cyber Future.’ Asad’s creative strategy has led to AVID developing a robust social media presence transforming it into an integral channel for learning. Asad holds a B.A. in Economics from St. Xavier's College (Mumbai) and an M.A. in Global Marketing Communications from Emerson College (Boston).
Read moreMumbai is a city that is never fully finished. It is constantly written and rewritten through movement,
memory, habit, and negotiation. Beyond its skyline and infrastructure lies a living script shaped by
commuters, street vendors, walkers, worshippers, filmmakers, and everyday citizens who animate its
spaces. This layered, ever-evolving character forms the heart of Mumbai Transcripts, the curatorial
theme that invites us to read the city not as a static design but as a lived text—one composed daily
through human action.
At the centre of this exploration is the idea that cities are not defined solely by architects or planners,
but by the ways people occupy, adapt, and reinterpret space. Mumbai’s icons—its streets,
promenades, markets, theatres, and public institutions—gain meaning through repetition and ritual. A
footpath becomes a workplace, a pause turns into a meeting point, and an informal shortcut becomes
part of the city’s collective knowledge. These everyday scripts reveal social hierarchies, cultural
negotiations, and forms of resilience that often remain invisible in formal master plans.
Reading the city through its daily rhythms allows us to notice the gaps between intention and use. It
shows how design is continuously challenged, softened, or transformed by lived reality. From the
choreography of rush-hour crowds to the quiet persistence of neighbourhood routines, Mumbai
demonstrates how people claim space creatively and intuitively. These actions are not incidental; they
are fundamental to how the city functions and how identity is produced within it.
Film, architecture, and design become powerful tools in this context—not merely to document the city,
but to interpret it. Visual storytelling helps capture the fleeting, fragile moments that define urban life:
gestures, sounds, pauses, and encounters that rarely make it into blueprints. By focusing on the
everyday, the conversation shifts from monumental narratives to intimate ones, asking how attention
to lived experience can lead to more inclusive and responsive approaches to shaping cities.
It is within this framework that ADFF: STIR Mumbai finds its resonance. As the world’s largest film
festival dedicated to architecture and design, ADFF offers a platform where cinema, urban thought,
and cultural reflection intersect. The festival’s engagement with Mumbai Transcripts creates space for
deeper dialogue around how cities are experienced rather than merely constructed, and how
storytelling—across film, design, and discourse—can illuminate the relationship between people and
place.
Ultimately, this exploration invites us to see Mumbai not as chaos to be solved, but as a complex,
intelligent system of lived practices. A city authored collectively, moment by moment, by those who
move through it—constantly shaping, resisting, and reimagining the urban story
