Dayanita Singh

Dayanita Singh

Dayanita Singh at National Museum, New Delhi, 2014
Born

1961 (age 54–55)

[1]
New Delhi

Residence New Delhi
Nationality Indian
Occupation Contemporary Artist, Photographer
Style Documentary, Portrait
Website dayanitasingh.com

Dayanita Singh is an artist. Her medium is photography and the book is her primary form. She studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City. She has published twelve books: Museum of Chance (2014), Fileroom (2013), House of Love (2011), Dayanita Singh (2010), Dream Villa (2010), Blue Book (2009), Sent a Letter (2008), Go Away Closer (2007), Chairs (2005), Privacy (2003), Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) and Zakir Hussain (1986).[2]

Dayanita Singh’s art reflects and expands on the ways in which people relate to photographic images. Her recent works, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, are a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh’s interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities.

Publishing is also a significant part of the artist’s practice: in her books, often made in collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, she experiments with alternate forms of producing and viewing photographs. Here, Singh’s latest is the “book-object,” a work that is concurrently a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue. This work, also developing from the artist’s interest in the poetic and narrative possibility of sequence and re-sequence, allows Singh to both create photographic sequence and also simultaneously disrupt it.

Museum Bhavan has been shown at the Hayward Gallery, London (2013), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014), the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2014) and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2016). Singh has also authored eleven books: Zakir Hussain (1986), Myself, Mona Ahmed (2001), Privacy (2003), Chairs (2005), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent A Letter (2008), Blue Book (2009), Dream Villa (2010), House of Love (2011), File Room (2013), and Museum of Chance (2014). Her twelfth book, Museum Bhavan, also published with Steidl, is forthcoming in Fall 2016. [3]

Singh was awarded the Prince Claus Award in 2008.[4] In 2013, she became the first Indian to have a solo show at London's Hayward Gallery.[5]

Early life and background

Born in Delhi, in 1961, Singh studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and later Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City.[1]

Career

Singh’s first foray into photography and bookmaking came through a chance encounter with tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, when he invited her to photograph him in rehearsal after she was shoved by an aggressive official while attempting to shoot him in concert. For six winters following this, Singh documented several Hussain tours and, in 1986, finally published the images in her first book, Zakir Hussain. Referring to him as her first "true guru", Singh believes that Hussain taught her the most important of all skills: focus.[6][1]

"Read, read, read. Forget studying photography – just go and study literature. Then you will bring something to the photography."

— Dayanita Singh, The Guardian, 2014[1]

Singh’s second book, Myself Mona Ahmed was published in 2001, after more than a decade spent on assignment as a photojournalist. A mix of photobook, biography, autobiography and fiction, this ‘visual novel’ emerged as a result of Mona’s refusal to be the subject of what could have been a routine but problematic photojournalistic project as well as Singh’s own discomfort with the West’s tendency to view India through simplistic, exotic lenses.[7][8]

Dayanita Singh in the National Museum, New Delhi, 2014.

In the years following this, Singh has collaborated with the publisher Gerhard Steidl in Goettingen, Germany to make a number of books, including Privacy, Chairs, the direction-changing Go Away Closer, the seven-volume Sent A Letter, Blue Book, Dream Villa, Fileroom and Museum of Chance.[9] Sent A Letter was included in the 2011 Phaidon Press book Defining Contemporary Art: 25 years in 200 Pivotal Artworks (ISBN 9780714862095).[10] Steidl said in a 2013 interview on Deutsche Welle television, "She is the genius of book making".[11] Dream Villa was produced during her Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; Singh was its second recipient in 2008.[12]

Singh's works have been presented in exhibitions throughout the world, most notably at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013 [13] and at the German pavilion in the Venice Biennale.[14] In 2009, the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid organised a retrospective of her work, which subsequently travelled to Amsterdam, Bogota and Umea.[15] Her pictures of "File Rooms" were first presented in the exhibition, "Illuminazione," at the 2011 Venice Biennale.[16]

In 2014, at the National Museum, New Delhi, the photo-based artist, built the Book Museum using her publications, File Room and Privacy as well as her mothers book, Nony Singh: The Archivist. And she also displayed a part of "Kitchen Museum" which are accordion-fold books with silver gelatin prints in 8 teak vitrines that she makes as letters to fellow travellers or conservationists since 2000. Seven of these were published by Steidl as "Sent a Letter".

Singh also presented the Museum of Chance as a book-object for the first time in India in November 2014 at a show in the Goethe-Institut in Mumbai and in January 2015 at a show in the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi. The book-object is a work that is a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue, all at once. In order to move away from showing editioned prints framed on the wall, Singh made the book itself the art object: a work to be valued, looked at and read as such, rather than being regarded as a gathering of photographic reproductions. [17]

Solo exhibitions

Book Museum in the National Museum, New Delhi

Group exhibitions

Kitchen Museum in the National Museum, New Delhi

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Malone, Theresa (10 October 2013). "Dayanita Singh's best photograph – a sulking schoolgirl". The Guardian. Retrieved 2014-11-25.
  2. ↑ "About Dayanita Singh".
  3. ↑ "About | Dayanita Singh |".
  4. ↑ "Dayanita Singh". Prince Claus Fund. Retrieved 2014-11-25.
  5. ↑ "Dayanita Singh dazzles at London's Hayward Gallery". The Times of India.
  6. ↑ "Infinite Possibilities". Financial Times.
  7. ↑ "Myself Mona Ahmed".
  8. ↑ "Its Her Story". The Hindu.
  9. ↑ Sen, Aveek (16 October 2008). "The Eye in Thought – The very rich hours of Dayanita Singh". The Telegraph. Calcutta, India. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  10. ↑ "Defining contemporary art : 25 years in 200 pivotal artworks". Catalogue. University of Technology, Sydney. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  11. ↑ "Die Fotografin Dayanita Singh" (in German). Deutsche Welle. 2 October 2013. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  12. 1 2 "An insomniac's guide to photography". Mint. 2 December 2011. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  13. ↑ "How Close is Closer: The Work of Dayanita Singh". Retrieved 29 October 2014.
  14. ↑ "Arts 21 Series: CrossCurrents". Arts.21. Retrieved 6 October 2013.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Dayanita Singh – Artist CV". Nature Morte. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  16. 1 2 3 "Infinite possibilities". Financial Times. 26 April 2013. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  17. ↑ "New Delhi - Event Calendar".
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 "About - Dayanita Singh". Retrieved 5 August 2016.
  19. ↑ "New Delhi - Event Calendar". Retrieved 10 May 2015.
  20. ↑ "Mumbai - Event Calendar". Retrieved 19 November 2014.
  21. ↑ "Dayanita Singh e-flux". Retrieved 19 November 2014.
  22. ↑ "Bio: Dayanita Singh". Frith Street Gallery. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  23. ↑ ""I Don't Want to Be Bound by Anything": Dayanita Singh Brings Her Cerebral Art to London's Frith Street Gallery". Artinfo. 6 July 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  24. ↑ "The Always Exceptional Condition of Images". Art-iT. 1 February 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  25. ↑ "Dayanita Singh – Exhibitions". Museum Huis Voor Fotografie. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  26. ↑ "Dayanita Singh: Dream Villa". Frith Street Gallery. 2008. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  27. 1 2 3 Aveek Sen (11 January 2007). "A Distance of One's Own – Dayanita Singh's Go Away Closer". The Telegraph. Calcutta, India. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  28. 1 2 3 Holland Cotter (30 March 2005). "Objects of Repose and Remembrance". New York Times. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  29. ↑ Gayatri Sinha (30 November 2003). "Documentation of life". The Hindu. Chennai, India. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  30. ↑ "Postcards from the Edge". Time. 11 October 2010. Retrieved 7 October 2013.

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