With this book, the internationally celebrated artist Dayanita Singh returns to her artistic beginnings. In the catalogue for the first comprehensive retrospective, the first stop of which is hosted by the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, Singh presents early works from her 1980-1986 oeuvre. From hundreds of slides and contact prints, the artist made a selection of personal and powerful black-and-white photographs. As a rediscovery and look into her own past, the theme of the "archive", central to Singh's work, takes on a central dimension here. The media of photography, installation and book intertwine in Singh's work in a unique way, which is why this book also features recent photographs from the exhibition.
A photographic archive of dance in its manifold forms, from Bollywood to classical dance.
Ever since Museum of Chance (2015), and particularly in her award-winning Museum Bhavan (2017), Dayanita Singh (born 1961) has created museums in book form--little offset symphonies that create a fluid space between the museum/gallery and publishing. Now, in Museum of Dance, Singh collects all the images of people dancing that she made in the 1980s and '90s--from her mother, Nony Singh, her friend and collaborator Mona Ahmed (subject of Singh's 2001 visual novel Myself Mona Ahmed), to classical dancers and the renowned Bollywood choreographer Masterji. Published to coincide with her traveling retrospective Dancing with the Camera, this book is Singh's tribute to dance, as well as her exploration of photography and bookmaking as metaphorical forms of dance--where rehearsed and spontaneous rhythms combine through intuition in unpredictable ways.
A clothbound documentation of Singh's travels with India's great classical musicians over six winters.
In the early 1980s, with her very first camera in hand, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) traveled throughout India for six winters with the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, photographing several great classical musicians and creating an image archive of them on stage and backstage, in their homes and on the bus transporting them from concert to concert. When the time came for Singh to edit her work into a book, she chose to focus on the tanpura--a long-necked, four-stringed drone instrument that both evokes and supports the musician's voice, both during performance and the process of daily practice of riyaz. Museum of Tanpura celebrates the tanpura as a musician's constant companion, the environments and relationships which bring music into being, and embodies what Singh sees as her greatest lesson from the performers she befriended--the rigor and aesthetics of riyaz.
A photobook archive of archives, from rarely seen collections throughout India.
The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh (born 1961)--both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time, and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can revisit and display at will. In Pothi Khana (Hindi for "archive room"), Singh presents photographs of India's seemingly endless private and public archives: shelf after shelf of bundles wrapped and knotted in pieces of cloth once colorful but now almost white with age. The documents within these bundles remain known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in Singh's images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. Originally exhibited in 2018 at the 57th Carnegie International as a group of modular, pillarlike wooden structures whose photographs could be endlessly resequenced, Singh now transforms the mobile sensibility of Pothi Khana into this volume, which she sees as a compendium to 2013's File Room.
La photographe indienne nous livre une série de photographies de nuit, prises à l'étrange lumière des néons qui transforme l'ordinaire en quelque chose de mystérieux et troublant.
Photographer Dayanita Singh is an obsessive book-maker who archives all of her journeys with tiny prints pasted into accordion-folded books. This volume contains her blue images, most of which were made against industrial backdrops during her wanderings in India.
