Choreographing Images: Q&A with Dayanita Singh, for Aesthetica
Indian artist Dayanita Singh (b. 1961) is a trailblazer in photography. Since the 1980s, the Hasselblad Award-winner has pushed the limits of the way the medium is displayed – transforming black-and-white prints into three dimensional “photo-architectures”, mobile museums, montages and book objects. Crucially, Singh sees photographs as raw materials: building blocks to be rearranged, recombined and re-experienced spatially. As a major retrospective opens at Gropius Bau, Berlin, the artist talks to Aesthetica about this unique vision, exploring the role of the body in taking and experiencing pictures.
Dayanita Singh, Museum of Chance, 2013
A: You trained in Visual Communication. What drew you to the medium of photography?
DS: It wasn’t really the medium of photography that drew me, rather the fact that I could be free of all the social obligations a woman had in 1980s India. I could say: “I’m a photographer so I can’t get married, I can’t have children. I need to travel; I need to live in different places.” Basically, it was a life choice that I was making. And it’s still the case: I still want to be free and not boxed in as much as possible.
A: That could be a description of how you work with photography: not only in creating but curating images. What inspired this artistic approach?
DS: I grew up around a mother who was an obsessive photographer and album maker. There were images being taken, but also something being done with the images – either they would become part of an album or were inserted onto a table covered with glass. I knew from the beginning that photography needed to be activated; it wasn’t enough to just have prints on the wall.
While I was a student, I made a book called Zakir Hussain (1986). From then on, I knew that I wanted to somehow work with books, but it was only when I made Sent a Letter (2007) that I realised I had found the way for the book itself to become the exhibition. That gave me confidence in the forms I wanted to create. The Museums [Singh made a number of works in the form of mobile museums] were important for me, because I wanted to constantly change the architecture of the space where my work was being shown. I didn’t like how photographs were fossilised on museum or gallery walls. I preferred the haptic quality of books. Museums allowed me to invite the viewer to experience the images as they would a sculpture: you have to walk around, bend down, move away, come close…
Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera was at Gropius Bau, Berlin berlinerfestspiele.de