Dayanita Singh: Museum Bhavan

“With the Steidl box, you can host Museum Bhavan in your bedroom, send it on its own tour to friends in Madrid, or share it among your students.” Dayanita Singh

Is it a book? Is it an exhibition? Bookmaking and museum-making are inseparable in Dayanita Singh’s work. Intrinsically woven with her practice of image-making as a way to catalogue, preserve and share moments and memories, she is in search of a form that is in “structural flux”, and therefore, ever incomplete.

Museum Bhavan, Singh’s new “pocket museum”, is a unique artwork consisting of nine miniature museums and a book of conversations, all housed in a handmade box. The small books can be carried around in a bag or in one’s back pocket and be flipped through while commuting to work or while waiting for a friend.

For the release of Museum Bhavan, Singh travels through Europe in September with stops at Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence in Turkey (11 September), Bildband Berlin (15 September), MiCamera in Milan (26 September), Zurich (27 September), Le Bal in Paris (28 September), and Tate Modern in London (30 September).