Dayanita Singh: Archivio

The exhibition presents the interweaving of two strands of the artist’s work: her long-standing engagement with institutional archives and her decades-long visual dialogue with architecture, interiors, works of art, friends, archivists, flowers, and more.

The exhibition is Singh’s tribute both to the Italian archives she has photographed over the past ten years and to her own archive of images created in Italy over the past twenty-five. It will travel from the State Archives of Venice to the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, the MAO – Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, and the Italian Cultural Institute in New Delhi.

In “Archivio”, the act of photographing becomes a form of cataloguing, a continuous attempt to understand how memory is shaped, structured, and preserved.

The exhibition, which will be open during the 19th edition of Incroci di civiltà, will be accompanied by a public programme of talks, lectures, and book presentations.

In addition, the artist will lead a mentoring programme for university students, developed in collaboration with the Iuav University of Venice on the occasion of its centenary, and with the Departments of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage and Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.