She has just exchanged a photograph on a picture surface in the room in order to change the overall tableau, when the Indian artist Dayanita Singh is already rushing to the next installation. Opens teak wings, pushes them together, folds over elements of a screen, creating views into and out of the other side and also changes the shape of the object in the room. Most importantly, Singh creates new connections between her images, which can be seen in the new exhibition “Dancing With My Camera” at Villa Stuck. But the connections she creates between the images are never complete. Everything keeps moving.
Where, for example, only pictures of Mona Ahmed, who she photographed for more than four decades, could be seen, these are now inserted between countless photos that Singh has taken of Indian musicians over the years. For Singh, Mona Ahmed was an extraordinarily fascinating person. She met her in 1989 when Singh, who was born in Delhi in 1961, represented the Londoners Times should realize a photo reportage about transgender and intersex people. Mona was rejected by her family and later also by the community of eunuchs and lived for years outside of the strictly hierarchically organized Indian society until her death in 2017 in a cemetery in Delhi, where she was then buried.
Singh found a “co-conspirator” in the Göttingen publisher Gerhard Steidl
Elsewhere, by shifting the image carrier, Singh allows a series of images of the dancing Mona to appear in the midst of other dancers. The photographs of Mona and some other people – the tabla player Ustad Zakir Hussain or Singh’s mother – run like a red thread through the exhibition. Singh’s recordings show a wide variety of people dancing, professional dancers, children dancing as if in oblivion, close family members, friends and relatives of Singh dancing together at festivals and celebrations. The photographer, who has spent years dealing with Indian music, the changes in Indian society, friendships, gender roles and much more, casually created an image of Indian society. And just as she watches them dance, Dayanita Singh also dances – albeit with her camera. With the Hasselblad in front of her, she circles the people. In doing so, she herself is just as constantly in motion as she keeps her medium in motion through the installations with interchangeable and movable wooden frames. It’s as if Dayanita Singh wanted to bring this moment frozen in a photo back into motion.
Dayanita Singh, who is currently on view at Villa Stuck with the exhibition “Dancing With My Camera”, here among old contact sheets. She called the recording “Let’s See”.
(Photo: Dayanita Singh)
Dayanita Singh: “Corbu Pillar” from 2021. The individual images can be exchanged and the elements can be shifted to form a new image-space sculpture.
(Photo: Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London)
Photographic narratives in the form of leporellos: Dayanita Singh’s “Museum Bhavan” from 2017, here in an installation in front of the Taj Mahal.
(Photo: Courtesy the artist and Steidl, Göttingen)
In most cases, the black-and-white photographs, which are arranged in a manner reminiscent of a contact sheet, are held in place by simple teak frames and supports. Sometimes there is a table and stools in front of or behind it. Others are set up in the form of leporellos or hang on the walls like open book pages as readers. There are boxes and suitcases everywhere that contain more recordings. Singh herself isn’t exactly sure how many recordings are on display from her collections, which she calls a “museum.” In any case, there is still enough material in the boxes for the curators – in the Villa Stuck these are Stephanie Rosenthal, Helena Pereña and Sabine Schmid – to be able to change the arrangements again and again. What this means for the visitor: even if you have taken enough time to immerse yourself deeply in this reflection of Indian society, you can make different discoveries with every new visit. Only the series of architectural montages, in which nothing is as it seems, and the glowing red “Time Measures” packets marked by traces of bleaching – arranged very nicely room-high on a wall in the new studio – seem to be permanently closed for the duration of the exhibition be.
“Photographs are my raw material. I like making mobile museums and books that become objects.” This is how Dayanita Singh summarizes her work. So her work never ends with the photo. While she herself is constantly changing her exhibitions – Dayanita Singh has now exhibited worldwide, she was previously at the Gropiusbau in Berlin with this presentation and is then going to Luxembourg and Porto – one wonders how this is supposed to work with books. But here, too, she has found a publisher who works on forms of publication as consistently as she does: the Göttingen publisher Gerhard Steidl. He understands her vision of the mobile concept, which can take various forms, and has even made a book with 88 different covers according to her wishes. Singh, who describes herself as an “offset artist”, calls Steidl, who printed her first book in 2001, her “co-conspirator”. The conversation between the two next Saturday should be revealing.
Dayanita Singh has just become the first woman from Asia to receive the renowned Hasselblad Prize. According to the jury, she “formed new ways of dealing with images”. The award, worth two million Swedish crowns (currently a good 180,000 euros), has been awarded annually since 1982. The list of winners is like a Who’s Who of the world’s photo elite. And interestingly, in 1997 Singh received a grant from Robert Frank, who had won the Hasselblad Prize the year before. Her Hasselblad camera has accompanied Dayanita Singh for decades, and Singh says it has long since become a part of her body. Therefore, for her, taking photos is a physical act, a dance with the camera. This is impressively demonstrated by the “Dancing With My Camera” exhibition.
Dayanita Singh: Dancing With My Camera, until March 19, Villa Stucco Museum, Prinzregentenstr. 60, conversation between Dayanita Singh and the publisher Gerhard Steidl: Sat., Oct. 22, 3 p.m