Dayanita Singh takes her mini museums on a tour

As she creates mini museums for a series of shows, Dayanita Singh dwells on the photographer as an archivist and curator

- Avantika Bhuyan

Dayanita Singh's new series of exhibitions, taking place across multiple cities, unfurls like an anthology of short stories. You could read a single chapter, or read the stories in succession to find threads that connect them all. The path to navigating Singh's works rests with the viewer.

One of the threads that unites the series of exhibitions—currently on view in Mumbai, Jaipur and Kolkata, with new chapters to open in Vadodara and Ahmedabad in March—is her unique idea of photo architecture. Singh has, in recent years, taken on the role of an archivist, curator and a photo architect. Delving into a rich repository of images taken from the 1980s onwards, she creates compact, portable teak structures, which she calls museums. Singh removes images, adds new ones, edits the combinations, simply leaves the grids bare, or collapses the structures over time. No two museums are ever alike. Each time, she makes new meanings, creates fresh sequences, or establishes long-lost connections between series of images taken across time, and more.

In 2015, she created a maze of nine wooden structures at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, and called it "Museum Bhavan." Each featured a collection of memories, which were grouped as Museums of Little Ladies, Men, Furniture, Chance, and more. In 2017, Museum of Chance was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, complete with the wooden structures, over 160 images, four tables and stools and smaller boxes to be put on walls. This was not just momentous in its own right but also signified a shift in the way in which the contemporary art ecosystem and the viewer had begun to perceive photography—not something to be put up on gallery walls in static displays but one which could be accessed in all kinds of spaces and viewed in different formats from different vantage points.