Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera

Since the 1980s, Dayanita Singh has pioneered a genre-defying approach to photography that pushes the limits of the medium. Dancing with my Camera presents the major phases of the internationally renowned artist’s oeuvre, from her earliest works through today. Along with key past works, including her “museums”, the new project, Let’s See, is especially realised for the Gropius Bau exhibition.

Singh’s black-and-white photographs create archives and spaces, presenting people and architectures from distinct backgrounds and geographies in states of interconnection. In her works, the photograph is only the raw material. By building mobile structures out of teak wood, her images are rearranged, recombined and re-experienced spatially; hers is a photography that both begins and ends with bodily experience.

Through a process of meticulous yet intuitive editing, Singh transforms her images into photo-architectures, montages and book objects – always guided by fluidity, music, choreography and movement. With her portable “museums” and book-objects, Singh has pioneered a form that is simultaneously a book, a catalogue and exhibition in itself. Singh shows how we can conceive of dynamic, mobile and accessible museums and exhibitions.