Curator’s Notes
Our other artist working with photography is Dayanita Singh, who interrogates the medium through a variety of strategies. She treats the photograph and the image it portrays as a cipher that is open to limitless permutations, decks of cards to be shuffled and re-shuffled endlessly. Her work takes the forms of books, posters, sculptures, portable archives, videos, and installations. On view is her work entitled “Time Measures” from 2016, comprising 34 color prints. Each photograph depicts a cloth bundle, all strangely similar yet each one unique, their contents and provenance remaining a mystery. Each is composed of a natural muslin which has been dyed red and tied with a cord, the red dye fading in different configurations over time.  Singh arranges the images into movements, as if they are parts of a musical score or are predicting weather patterns. “Time Measures” releases us from both linear and cyclical notions of recorded time, positing the subtle shadings of color, the sensuality of folded cloth, and the repetition of patterns as ways to discern the chronologies of our lives. Also included in the exhibition are three black-and-white photographs from 2024 entitled “Archivologies I, II and III.” These are equally mysterious images, bundles of what appear to be papers, yet misshapen into what could be prehistoric organic artifacts, one ponders the wealth of information each cluster might contain.

Artist Bio
Dayanita Singh (b. 1961, New Delhi) uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to images. Her recent works, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, are a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be 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. Museum of Chance (2013), for instance, may at one moment exist as two immense pillars while at another it could fold out into flat screens, transforming into a single room in which visitors may sit at tables and converse. Recently, the museums have evolved into the singular pillar form, consisting of five cubes that can pack flat, accompanied by a stool. The modular design of Bawa Rocks (2021) allows for the rearrangement of the stackable cubes and the swapping of photographs. The images themselves reflect Singh’s love of the architecture of Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2013): ‘I went to [Bawa’s] Kandalama Hotel and I recognised it. I recognised the aesthetic, knew the light’. Singh has continued to reconceptualise architecture in a new series of Montages, which seamlessly splice together images from diverse spaces to create phantastic yet plausible settings.

Publishing is also a significant part of the artist’s practice: in her books, often published without text, Singh extends her experiments on alternate forms of producing and viewing photographs. She says, ‘the book is at the heart of my work. To me, the exhibition is the catalogue of the works in the book’.