Exhibition texts

Dayanita Singh conceives of photography as the raw material for her work. She draws perfect circles here: her photographs become a book, which becomes an exhibition, which becomes a catalogue.

Museum of Chance (2013) marks a turning point in Singh’s practice. With it, Singh invented a form that she calls her “museum”. At once a portable museum, photo-architecture and a foldable exhibition, Museum of Chance is the “mother museum” of those presented in the subsequent rooms.

With 163 images taken across three decades, Museum of Chance shows bodies entangled, dancing and moving. We see clothing hanging on racks or rails, and personal cycles of rebirth, storage, recollection and memory.

Each structure, made with hand-built teak panels, is moveable, with wings that open and close. Singh’s museums are at once an archive, storage device and presentation structure for her photographs, enlarged contact sheets and mobile architectures in space.

Singh’s editing process – sorting through contact sheets containing many images – is meticulous and intuitive. She refers to her contact sheets as the heart of her archive, her diary of four decades. Even when she now photographs digitally, she still produces analogue contact sheets to edit the work, then making tiny prints that she hand-cuts and refusing to use the computer until necessary. This is a highly tactile process, which furthers an on-going interest in the connection between human touch and cycles of music, rhythm and movement.

Ever since her 1980s project photographing Ustad Zakir Hussain and classical musicians on tour, Dayanita Singh’s photographs have focused not only on individual figures but on other artistic forms too – architecture, dance and especially music. The photographs in Museum of Tanpura (2021) take us through concert halls, backstage rooms, drawing rooms, hotel rooms, bedrooms and even a Musician’s Bus (2021).

Singh refers to herself as an archivist. While looking at the contact sheets of her early work Singh found these images. She undertook an intensive process of re-archiving, re-selecting and sorting. She terms this key stage in her process “editing” and “listening” to images. Through this activity, Singh has identified a new protagonist in her early project: a drone instrument called the tanpura.

The result is her Museum of Tanpura, presented in three pillars. In Indian classical music, the tanpura does not play a melody, but is a “backbone” setting the tone that is played alongside the solo musician. In Museum of Tanpura, it is identified as a hidden character that stages a consistent mood for the project.

Displayed on the wall, Kishori Tai (2021) was published by Singh’s imprint Spontaneous Books and named after the great Indian classical vocalist Kishori Amonkar. Singh was surprised to find these images, which were made on one Guru Purnima (a day on which scholars pay homage to their gurus) in her archive of musicians. This book-exhibition demonstrates Singh’s process of reinvention through editing, as she returns to individual projects, discovering new characters and protagonists.

The hand-made accordion-book Musician’s Bus is similar in size to Kishori Tai. It uses a range of images from the archive

The major project Sent a Letter Museum (2008/2021) was an important milestone in Dayanita Singh’s investigation of modular forms, photography and book-objects. Through Sent a Letter (2008), she uncovered one form in which her book became the exhibition. As such, Sent a Letter led directly to Singh’s subsequent “museums”.

Sent a Letter is a handmade cloth box with seven accordion-fold books that unfold to become seven exhibitions. The images in Sent a Letter convey Singh’s travels in 2002 – to Calcutta (Kolkata), Devigarh, Bombay (Mumbai), Allahabad (Prayagraj), Varanasi, Padmanabhapuram – and one book with photographs of Singh taken by her mother Nony Singh.

During these travels, Singh produced photographic journals in Moleskine notebooks, each referencing a specific figure who had accompanied her – visiting a site, a museum or landmark. The photographs in Sent a Letter are at once acts of correspondence and recollection, referring to states of dispersion, wandering and connection implied by travel.

Each book represents a diary, but is also a gift that can be unfolded. The works enact Singh’s move to a form that combines photography with books and, by extension, books and exhibitions. Each intimate work constitutes an exhibition in itself.

Dayanita Singh circles back to sites, spaces and motifs across decades, but she returns especially to specific people. For the twelve prints in I am as I am (1999), Singh returns to an ashram in Varanasi, India. Singh used to visit this place with her family as a child. Years later, when she started making photographs, she returned to the ashram and met Jyoti, a young girl who became a close friend of Singh’s and who she continues to photograph even now.

The ashram in Varanasi is a place of seclusion, a home where girls can determine whether or not they will pursue a life of religious devotion. In these images, Singh manages to portray the intimacy and safety of the space. We sense the privacy that permits the commingling of play and devotion – to spirituality and to each other.

Nearly two decades later, this project served as a prompt for Singh to further develop her idea of “shedding”, which she adapts from a spiritual vocabulary, and refers to a process of refinement through reduction.

Published by her own imprint, Spontaneous Books, Dayanita Singh’s Box 507 (2019) pays homage to Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan architect. Bawa’s Kandalama Hotel, nestled within rocks and mountains, it incorporates the specific geography of its site into its semi-interior spaces. Bawa stayed in room 507 when he visited his signature hotel project.

In contrast to the situated nature of static architecture, Box 507 demonstrates Singh’s unique practice of making her book-objects mobile, portable and “unfixed”, enabling viewers to take Singh’s exhibitions home and encouraging them to curate their own exhibitions.

Box 507 is made in an edition of 360. Each teak box contains 30 offset-printed image cards. The collector can change the front card of the edition. In the offset process, Singh has found another way to print her images.

Similarly, for her Painted Photos (2021–2022), Singh overlaid a coat of white paint over images from her archive. A cloudy film now rests upon her original subjects. Through this act, the artist references the overlapping of memory and withholding, as well as the cloth coverings around some of her book-objects. Similarly, Singh has often stored her own museums in her home, protected with white muslin cloth covers so that the images become ghosts of themselves.

Singh writes, “The Painted Photos reduce the images, pare them down to an essence, even a scent, if you will,” adding that “they just become hints of the images.”

From her earliest project, Zakir Hussain: A Photo Essay (1986), through to her latest book, Let’s See (to be published by Steidl Verlag), bookmaking has been intrinsic to Dayanita Singh’s work. Referring to herself as an “offset artist”, Singh views offset printing as a literal metaphor, so to speak, one that enables the dissemination of information, images and material. Singh has a unique view on exhibitions: each book does not represent an “original” exhibition but is, in fact, the original exhibition itself. As such, anyone with access to each book can view the exhibition whenever and wherever they are – freeing the exhibition from the specific constraints of the wall and the institution.

Over the years this practice has progressed from the handmade maquette of the Zakir Hussain book into accordion-fold books, bookmuseums and more conventionally bound volumes. It has also resulted in a multi-year artistic collaboration with the Göttingenbased publishing house Steidl Verlag, with whom Singh has published Privacy (2003), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent a Letter (2008), Dream Villa (2010), File Room (2013), Museum of Chance (2014), Museum Bhavan (2017) and Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019). Each of the recent books is at once an exhibition, a portable museum and an original work.

Singh’s “museums” – nine in all – are united and collected as the Museum Bhavan (2017), Hindi for “large gathering space”. Museum Bhavan consists of nine individual book-museums, contained in a handmade box that can be unfolded and installed as and when desired. Each cover of the box is unique.

Pothi Box (2018) is one of Singh’s book-objects published by Spontaneous Books. In this work, a wooden structure, wrapped in fabric, contains an unbound book of 30 image cards, which can be re-sorted as desired. For Singh, it is important that there is no “original single print” other than these boxes, which exist as an edition of 360. That way, the exhibition can be taken home relatively inexpensively, and acquired directly off the wall. When all the boxes are sold, the edition and exhibition have ended, or are complete.

Singh’s books are always on the move, like the Book-cart (2011) or My Life as a Museum (2018), a nine pocket jacket produced in India and dyed with indigo, presented on a hanger.

Both as an object and in what it contains, Suitcase Museum (2015) embodies the forces of dissemination, mobility, motion and access that are key to Singh’s practice. Inside two leather suitcases are 22 book-objects. Each book-object in turn holds a copy of the Museum of Chance book with its 44 different front and back covers, amounting to a total of 44 book-objects within the two suitcases.

Singh’s book-objects and museums can be seen as a challenge to conventions of the museum exhibition form, with its de facto static character. At once a book, a suitcase, an exhibition, an object and a metaphor for portability, each museum suggests one way we can consider a new form for museum architectures beyond the confines of the institution. Yet, the leather suitcases also contain connotations of migration, tourism, travel and displacement, as well as being repositories of memory and history.

“Time measures/Nothing but itself”, the author W. G. Sebald wrote and thus inspired the title of this series. The colour photographs in Time Measures (2016) bridge Singh’s ongoing interest in archives, the motion of time and the personal associations that we have with fabric, with an alternating sense of privacy or withholding featuring in her projects.

In an archive in India, Singh discovered bundles of documents that were wrapped in fabric. They are enigmatic, we do not know their contents and they are tied with a unique knot.

Photographed head on, with a rare use of colour for Singh, the photographs carry a tension between the images’ bright tones and the aged, faded, warped fabric. The images carry an opposition between the repetition of the knots and their individual, almost expressive, uniqueness. As a result, each bundle is both the same and different.

A sense of repetition and rhythm is produced by their hanging, connecting to Singh’s interest in movement and music. The appearance of light imprinted and then faded on cloth is a cue for photography itself with its interplay of light, exposure, time and material.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, Dayanita Singh continued her process of diving deep into her archive of analogue contact sheets – her process of “editing”. She finally found the time to go through her very early work of the 1980s. This editing resulted in an entirely new work and structure, Let’s See (2021), which charts a new way forward for Singh’s practice and is realised for the first time in this retrospective.

These 108 images, across twelve panels, show images from the 1980s. They contain some of Singh’s earliest photographs, most made even before she began to refer to herself as an artist. Typically, before being printed on photo paper and mounted, photographic originals are compiled in sheets containing many images on a single page – this is called a contact sheet. Singh’s panels, in this new structure, reference contact sheets, albeit at enlarged scale. They can be arranged in several ways because the images slide in and out of the structure.

These early photographs, seen today, contain many of Singh’s later trademarks, including the close, yet always enigmatic, representation of figures in states of intimacy. In Let’s See, whose topic may be photography itself, certain leitmotifs emerge including human connection through rituals relating to hair, bodies entangled or touching one another in various poses of affection or states of repose, which are reminiscent of dance.

Musical interests, such as in the tanpura – a drone instrument in Indian classical music – combine with Singh’s interest in movement, transformation and touch. All are accomplished within a precise if candid-seeming photographic act. Let’s See reveals the seeds of many of Singh’s later works and protagonists.