Dayanita Singh: All the time dismantling and disseminating  

I attain Dayanita Singh’s house and studio on a cold December night, and I’m instantly greeted by hugs, espresso, and fascinating prints of the veteran photographer’s works. Scattered round are miniature variations of the buildings for her cell museums.

Singh is within the midst of making one among her largest travelling exhibitions — six showcases in 5 cities — however she is calm and centered as we sip espresso. She talks about how, through the years, she has taken on the position of curator, archivist, and extra lately, a photograph architect, who’s “collapsing time and geography” by means of her analogue montages mounted on compact, moveable wood installations. These have freed her of partitions, and permits her to alter the order of the show, defining how the works are laid out and noticed.

“I’m engaged with what it means to disseminate an exhibition. Particularly one that’s as massive as Dancing with my Digicam [curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, it started its journey in 2022 in Gropius Bau, Berlin, and ended in May 2024 at the Museum Serralves in Porto, Portugal],” she says. The touring retrospective “was displayed in 11 galleries, which is why it made sense to have a collection of exhibitions again house, unfold throughout India”.

Singh is so engaged that she attracts a diagram to point out her complicated plan: Museums of Tanpura on the simply concluded Bengal Biennale; Museums on Tour at Kolkata’s Indian Museum, until March 31; Picture Lies at Mumbai’s Jehangir Nicholson Artwork Basis, until February 23; Time Measures on the Jaipur Centre for Artwork, until March 16; Picture Structure at Ahmedabad’s Kanoria Centre for Arts, from March 1 to April 27; and Mona and Myself at Vadodara’s Gallery White, from March 6 to April 30.

Time Measures on the Jaipur Centre for Artwork
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Lodovico Colli di Felizzano

The huge dissemination appears overwhelming, however Singh isn’t fazed. “That is what I do. My work have to be taken past galleries the place some individuals come simply to take selfies and probably not have a look at the work,” she says.

Pushing the ‘ photoness of images’

Singh has by no means been one to accept a single type, be it in her images or the best way she shows her work. From constructing sculptural installations to utilizing her photographs to make books, she is continually innovating. The thread that unites her multi-venue venture now could be her thought of photograph structure.

Mining her massive repository that dates again to the Eighties, she is displaying totally different configurations of an exhibition in several cities, and including one thing new and particular with every iteration. “My ‘museums’ are in a position to change, each of their kind in addition to the pictures they maintain,” she says, pointing to a mannequin of the teak body in her drawing room. She switches the order and pictures as we converse, thus altering the viewing expertise immediately.

Picture Lies at Mumbai’s Jehangir Nicholson Artwork Basis
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This fluidity can also be evident in her architectural montages, the spotlight of her exhibition Picture Lies. She picks out a show on her wall, and as I look carefully I realise the gorgeous black-and-white picture of a well-lit inside area is definitely three totally different areas montaged collectively, every angle assembly in such a fashion that it creates a brand new location. “The primary picture was shot in Japan, the opposite in India, and the third in Sri Lanka,” she says, including how they’re a method for her to transcend the “photoness of images”. They aren’t digitally manufactured, she emphasises. “I introduced all three images collectively, bodily reducing and pasting them myself, to create one thing greater than what I began with.”

Dayanita Singh’s architectural montages

In an interview with Architectural Digest, she threw mild on the “early epiphany” that set her on this path. Whereas staying on the Heritance Kandalama lodge, designed by architect Geoffrey Bawa, she says she began “feeling a way of déjà vu, although I had not been to Sri Lanka earlier than”. She later found that Bawa had been impressed by the Padmanabhapuram Palace in Tamil Nadu, a spot she had photographed for one among her books. This put her on the trail to creating these “placeless locations”.

Montages at Picture Lies

Endlessly chasing new types

Within the coming months, Singh’s exhibitions will morph much more. Museums of Tanpura, which disseminates her work documenting classical musicians — together with Kishori tai (vocalist Kishori Amonkar) and Singh’s accordion-fold e book of the icon, and the Zakir Hussain Maquette, a facsimile of the e book she made as a scholar — will get larger as Singh provides extra works (Pillar of Pandals, Sari Museum and Indian Museum Pillar) and strikes the present into the Indian Museum’s corridors.

Picture Lies, in the meantime, will break up into two. One half will head to Ahmedabad, and the opposite to Vadodara. And on its journey there, it’s going to rework from an ode to structure into an ode to friendship — the celebration of Mona Ahmed (confined to montages and an set up of her desk within the Mumbai showcase) will develop into Mona and Myself, chronicling Singh’s decades-long relationship along with her buddy.

Singh’s Studio Field
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Even because the venture and the processes impress, there’s criticism too. Some say Singh has not created any new work, and is merely disseminating current work. “It doesn’t matter once I shot one thing. After I make a piece and show it, I recontextualise it,” Singh responds, expressing disappointment that the critics haven’t understood her course of. “Whether or not it’s architectural montages, constructed contacts, and painted images [painted over with enamel paint so they become ghost images of themselves], these are all new work. It isn’t simply new photographs, however new types that haven’t existed earlier than.” Certainly. Excavating, developing, de-constructing and re-constructing have all the time been on the coronary heart of Singh’s work.

The author is a critic-curator by day, and a visible artist by evening.