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拍品專文
Dayanita Singh is an artist who works with the medium of photography, using book-making as her primary vehicle to explore the ways in which people interact with images. Starting out as a photojournalist, Singh’s extensive practice spans the continuum between art and documentation, holding the tangible format of the ‘book-object’ as central. Deeply interested in the archive and the mutability of images and narratives in relation to each other, Singh has most recently exhibited her works as mobile museums, or self-designed structures in which the images from her vast body of work may be displayed in multiple permutations and sequences to mine the range of narrative possibilities they hold.
In many of her early photographs, often devoid of human figures, inanimate objects communicate a distinct sense of status, age, and gender. Singh developed these into a series of works and the book-object Chairs while she was artist in residence at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2005. At the museum, she was drawn to photographing the chairs in the galleries, as if they were people, communicating their places and histories. This photographic series now represents a journey that spans many years and cities including Kolkata, Boston, Venice, Coimbatore and Morvi. Their origins, however, may be traced to a series of photos of the empty rooms in Anand Bhavan, Allahabad, that Singh made in 2000. The artist recalls that this is when she “started to make photographs of spaces without human beings, yet peopled by the unseen generations before” (Artist statement, Privacy, Dayanita Singh, Gottingen, 2003, unpaginated).
As Geoff Dyer observes, “The dominant suggestion in Dayanita’s rooms is not so much of the absence of people so much as the lack of their absence: the idea of people, I mean, doesn’t rush in to fill the vacancy. The wide-awake day-bed, the armchair never passing up a chance to take the weight off its feet, the books wanting nothing more than to curl up with a good book – all are perfectly content with the prospect of an evening on their own, undisturbed by human intrusion” (G. Dyer, ‘Now we can See’, Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer, London, 2013, p. 19).
Most recently Singh’s work has been exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi; Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hayward Gallery, London; and at the Germany pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2013. Among her latest spontaneous books and book-objects are Box of Shedding, BV Box, Pothi Box and Museum of Chance, the last of which was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In many of her early photographs, often devoid of human figures, inanimate objects communicate a distinct sense of status, age, and gender. Singh developed these into a series of works and the book-object Chairs while she was artist in residence at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2005. At the museum, she was drawn to photographing the chairs in the galleries, as if they were people, communicating their places and histories. This photographic series now represents a journey that spans many years and cities including Kolkata, Boston, Venice, Coimbatore and Morvi. Their origins, however, may be traced to a series of photos of the empty rooms in Anand Bhavan, Allahabad, that Singh made in 2000. The artist recalls that this is when she “started to make photographs of spaces without human beings, yet peopled by the unseen generations before” (Artist statement, Privacy, Dayanita Singh, Gottingen, 2003, unpaginated).
As Geoff Dyer observes, “The dominant suggestion in Dayanita’s rooms is not so much of the absence of people so much as the lack of their absence: the idea of people, I mean, doesn’t rush in to fill the vacancy. The wide-awake day-bed, the armchair never passing up a chance to take the weight off its feet, the books wanting nothing more than to curl up with a good book – all are perfectly content with the prospect of an evening on their own, undisturbed by human intrusion” (G. Dyer, ‘Now we can See’, Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer, London, 2013, p. 19).
Most recently Singh’s work has been exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi; Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hayward Gallery, London; and at the Germany pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2013. Among her latest spontaneous books and book-objects are Box of Shedding, BV Box, Pothi Box and Museum of Chance, the last of which was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.