Dayanita Singh | Museum of Shedding

For Dayanita Singh photography is simply a starting point rather than an end in itself. Her work constantly pushes the boundaries of the form, examining how we might display and thereby think about the photographic image. Most notable are her experiments in bookmaking as well as her portable ‘museums’; large wooden structures that can be placed and opened in various configurations, each holding varying numbers of images within what she has termed “photo-architecture.”

Museum of Shedding is even more emphatically architectural than Singh’s previous Museums. It is a space which we can imagine the curator of the museum occupying. There is a bed, a desk, a bench, a table, a stool, and storage for the museum’s collection. This collection consists of black and white photographs of architecture; images of temples, hotels, and palaces as well as more humble domestic spaces. Some of these are ancient, some contemporary, but they are all linked by an austere, pared down beauty. The gallery walls are ready to show the museum’s collection, rows of nails suggesting endless possibilities for display, sequencing and editing. Museum of Shedding is a meditative work that ruminates on the artist’s relationship to photography, to the archive and to her own practice as a kind of “home.”

Shown alongside this is a series of colour photographs entitled Time Measures. These particular images are the latest to have emerged from Singh’s long-term interest in the paper archive. She discovered these bundles of fabric-wrapped documents in an archive in India. The bundles themselves are of indeterminate age, their contents are unknown. At some stage these papers were wrapped in red cotton fabric, placed on shelves and then forgotten. Every bundle is tied by a different hand with a different knot to seal it. Over the years these stacked bundles have faded and become compressed. The knots, in combination with the forms and faded colours, gives them very tangible personalities, turning each image into a singular portrait.