Dayanita Singh: Dancing with My Camera

Museum Villa Stuck presents the most comprehensive retrospective to date of internationally renowned artist Dayanita Singh, whose work occupies a unique place within the photographic tradition. Singh works with the medium of photography but always tries to push its limits through her conceptual and performative approach.

Over the past forty years, Singh has captured numerous subjects in her mostly black and white photographs. They reflect her longstanding preoccupation with music, the transformation of Indian society, friendships, gender roles, and much else. Still, Singh is never concerned with the individual image, but rather with the way relationships develop among photographs.

Dayanita Singh sees herself as an “offset artist,” meaning an artist whose work is dissemination. Her early series of works developed as book projects. In publications she combines her images into specific narratives, with the turning of the pages being a way of keeping the images moving. The books themselves also keep moving: as mobile objects they can be carried into any space.

Over time and especially through her exploration of the medium of the exhibition, she has developed a series of modular display structures that make it easy to switch images, while at the same time relating them spatially to one another and to viewers. She calls these flexible structures “museums.” They contain numerous images that can be presented in ever new constellations. The individual components are movable, depending on which parts are supposed to be visible; photographs not shown are kept inside. The museums thus carry their own art depot within themselves. Singh frequently uses (suit-)cases to transport her museums, thereby underscoring the central role of movement in her work—both as a theme and as a reflection of the many different approaches to art and forms of dissemination and presentation of her work.

In the exhibition, ambassadors activate selected museums at regular intervals. This means that the modular structures themselves as well as individual photographs will repeatedly be moved and rearranged. As a result, the exhibition will keep changing over the weeks and present itself afresh to visitors.

Alongside the exhibition are published various printed matter: a catalog in German and English as the most comprehensive publication to date on Singh’s art and an edition Singh has created especially for the exhibition. The catalog includes texts by Teju Cole, Kajri Jain, Ahona Palchoudhurim, and Thomas Weski among others. In addition, Steidl produced a large-format poster, that is conceived by Singh as a work for visitors to take home.

About the artist
Dayanita Singh (b. 1961, New Delhi) is one of the most important artists working today. She studied visual communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Singh first worked as a photojournalist before devoting herself fully to her own projects. Today she sees herself as an “offset artist”: a maker of books working with photographs. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. She has shown her work at the Guangzhou Biennial (2008), Manifesta (2008), and the Kochi Biennale (2014); in 2013 Singh’s work was featured alongside that of other artists in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2022 Singh received the Hasselblad Award, which will presented to her on October 14, 2022, in Göteborg, Sweden.

The exhibition is organized by Gropius Bau in collaboration with Museum VILLA STUCK, Munich, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxemburg, and Serralves Museum, Porto.

Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Helena Pereña and Sabine Schmid

Press contact: Museum Villa Stuck, presse.villastuck@muenchen.de