Dayanita Singh: Always dismantling and disseminating   Premium

Six exhibitions in five cities — photo-artist Dayanita Singh shares the story behind her travelling museums and how she began creating ‘placeless places’

I reach Dayanita Singh’s home and studio on a chilly December evening, and I am immediately greeted by hugs, coffee, and captivating prints of the veteran photographer’s works. Scattered around are miniature versions of the structures for her mobile museums.

Singh is in the midst of creating one of her biggest travelling exhibitions — six showcases in five cities — but she is calm and focused as we sip coffee. She talks about how, over the years, she has taken on the role of curator, archivist, and more recently, a photo architect, who is “collapsing time and geography” through her analogue montages mounted on compact, portable wooden installations. These have freed her of walls, and allows her to change the order of the display, defining how the works are laid out and observed.

“I am engaged with what it means to disseminate an exhibition. Especially one that is as large as Dancing with my Camera [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 series of exhibitions back home, spread across India”.

Singh is so engaged that she draws a diagram to show her complex plan: Museums of Tanpura at the just concluded Bengal Biennale; Museums on Tour at Kolkata’s Indian Museum, till March 31; Photo Lies at Mumbai’s Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, till February 23; Time Measures at the Jaipur Centre for Art, till March 16; Photo Architecture 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.

The vast dissemination seems overwhelming, but Singh isn’t fazed. “This is what I do. My work must be taken beyond galleries where some people come just to take selfies and not really look at the work,” she says.

Singh has never been one to settle for a single style, be it in her photography or the way she displays her work. From building sculptural installations to using her images to make books, she is constantly innovating. The thread that unites her multi-venue project now is her idea of photo architecture.

Mining her large repository that dates back to the 1980s, she is showing different configurations of an exhibition in different cities, and adding something new and specific with each iteration. “My ‘museums’ are able to change, both in their form as well as the images they hold,” she says, pointing to a model of the teak frame in her drawing room. She switches the order and images as we speak, thus changing the viewing experience instantly.