PHOTO:Dayanita Singh-Dancing with my Camera

Beginning in the 1980s, Dayanita Singh has pioneered a genre-defying approach to photography, one that pushes the limits of the medium and the boundaries of how we experience images. Singh liberates the photo from the wall, and the book from the bookshelf, to create unique forms of display and dissemination. For the first time, we will be able to see all of Singh’s works together and understand how her photographs ask for, and find, time and again, a new form.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gropius Bau Archive

For Dayanita Singh, the labour of photography lies not in the making of images but in conceptualising the forms within which they can grow. She challenges us to envision new, more mobile, accessible and fluid forms of exhibitions and museums. Her works traverse genres, forms and spaces – from mobile museums to book-objects, to books that become exhibitions themselves. “Dancing with my Camera” presents the key works of Dayanita  Singh’s oeuvre: starting with “I am as I am” (1999) and “Go Away Closer” (2007), to her most recent projects, “Let’s See” (2021), “Museum of Dance (Mother Loves to Dance)” (2021), “Museum of Tanpura” (2021), “Mona Montages” (2021) and “Painted Photos” (2021-2222) that is shown for the first time ever at the Gropius Bau. For Singh, photography is the raw material, rather than an end in itself. Over forty years, she has built a vast archive of images that she has mined especially for this exhibition. Her images are activated in relation to the unique forms that she creates for them. In “Dancing with my Camera”, Singh takes us on a journey by way of an ongoing chorus of images. Along the way, we meet friends and acquaintances whom she has photographed over decades in formal and intimate spaces, within family homes and bureaucratic archives, and dancing in green rooms or cemeteries. The survey charts the artist’s early encounter with her mentor, the tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain, which precipitated her becoming an artist and led to her first book, “Zakir Hussain: A Photo Essay” (1986) while she was still a student. Displayed on the walls of the exhibition is the book “Zakir Hussain Maquette” (2019). Hussain is also one of the protagonists of the “Museum of Tanpura” (2021). Several works are devoted to Mona Ahmed, a transgender individual and Singh’s closest friend who died in 2017, with whom she made the now classic book “Myself Mona Ahmed” (2001). This exhibition includes the new “Mona Montages” (2021) in which Singh manually cuts and pastes images of Mona into her “Privacy”, “File Room” and “Masterji” series. We also hear Mona reciting Urdu poetry in the video-work “Mona Shayari” (2013/2021). One of Singh’s key inventions are her “museums”, which mark an important turning point in her practice and led to “Museum Bhavan” (2013): a travelling family of nine “museums”. Each museum holds a collection of old and new images drawn from the artist’s photographic oeuvre encased in mobile wooden structures. The museums are built to allow for quick changes in their images and to transform the space in which they are installed. They combine display and storage, and compel viewers to engage with their bodies as they dance around the constructions to experience the images. This is what Singh terms “photo-architecture”.

The “Museum of Chance” (2013) is the “mother museum” of the several museums presented. In its large wooden structures, viewers can see its 163 photographs. Across the hall, the same photographs transform into the “Suitcase Museum” (2015) that holds within it 44 Museum of Chance book-objects. In the same room, the photographs also take the form of one of the nine accordion fold books in the “Museum Bhavan box” (2017). In this way, Singh’s work moves in ongoing circles between the forms that she invents. The domestic space of “Museum of Shedding” (2016) was built so that the artist herself could live inside it. It includes a bed and a desk as well as a visitor’s bench. The retrospective also brings together Singh’s fascination with personal and institutional archives – through classic works such as “File Museum” (2012), “File Room Bookcase” (2014), “Time Measures” (2016) and “Kochi Box” (2016). She is equally obsessed with her own archive, which exists primarily in analogue contact sheets. Singh works with these sheets to continuously re-examine her archive. Through this process she generates new works such as “Let’s See” (2021) which has an entirely new form that draws from the contact sheet. The human touch, dancing, movement and music as well as encounters with people, objects and media emerge as recurring leitmotifs in Singh’s images, as they pass through continents and geographies. Completed for the Gropius Bau exhibition, Singh’s “Museum of Dance (Mother Loves to Dance)” (2021) results from the artist’s fascination with movement, and features a typology of images of dancers. The 108 images establish what can be described as a kinship of figures that have appeared in her work – from Mona, dancing on the streets and in the cemetery where she finally lived and is now buried, to Singh’s mother dancing during family weddings, to some of the greatest Classical Indian dancers and Bollywood choreographers. The exhibition pays special attention to Singh’s book-objects, an essential component of her oeuvre: for Singh, the published book is not a supplement to the exhibition, but an exhibition in itself – subject to a continuous practice of transfiguration, and accessible to anyone to take home with them. By doing so, she invites people to become the curators of her work in their homes. Singh believes image making is a very small part of photography and the strength of the medium is in the power of dissemination. This is why she often calls herself an “offset artist”. Singh has published 13 books so far, and has recast our understanding of her books by giving them a more important role than even her exhibition prints. Most of her works are first conceived in the form of a book. Many of these books, originally published with Steidl as trade editions, are now shown in their book-object form in the exhibition.

Photo: Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan, 2017, installed in front of the Taj Mahal, Courtesy: The artist and Steidl, Göttingen

Info: Curator: Stephanie Rosenthal, Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 18/3-7/8/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.berlinerfestspiele.de