Dayanita Singh: Dancing with My Camera

Villa Stuck Museum exhibits a numerous selection of works by Dayanita Singh, and through her conceptual and performative approach she always tries to explore the boundaries of the medium.

Dayanita Singh has captured numerous motifs in her mostly black and white photographs over the last 40 years. They make tangible her longstanding preoccupation with Indian music, with the changes in Indian society, with friendships, gender roles and much more. Yet the focus is never on the individual image, but on the relationships that develop between the photographs. In various formats – books, collages, modular structures made of wood – she brings these photographs together again and again, taking into account the mobility of the medium. Over time, she has developed a series of modular display structures, some of them architecturally sophisticated, that allow images to be easily changed and at the same time relate to each other spatially as well as to the viewers. She calls these flexible structures “museums”. They contain numerous images that can be presented again and again in new constellations. In this way, the “museums” carry their own art depot within them. At the same time, the idea of portable art has a socio-political dimension in terms of change and diversity.