Sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars and prominently displayed in the home of Kim Kardashian, modernist furniture from Chandigarh has taken the European and North American design worlds by storm.

Despite this prominence, little is widely known about the Chandigarh chairs beyond their attribution to Pierre Jeanneret (cousin of Le Corbusier), their admired exemplification of mid-century modern design; their supposed ‘under appreciation’ in Chandigarh, and that they are now worth vast sums of money.

This session seeks to probe current narratives regarding Chandigarh’s modernist furniture, problematising previously unquestioned ‘facts’, highlighting gaps in the chairs’ history, and beginning to connect the story of these particular pieces of furniture with wider narratives of capitalist exploitation and neo-colonialism.