For most of her career, Dayanita Singh has placed programmatic disobedience at the core of her approach to photography, challenging the formal qualities of images as well as the way they are exhibited. Amandas Ong speaks to her ahead of her show opening at Frith Street Gallery, London. Installation view, ‘Dayanita Singh: Museum of Shedding’, at Frith Street Gallery, London. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Steve White With this exhibition as well as in your previous work, you challenge the physical flatness of photography [the exhibition contains architectural and furniture elements], while completely decontextualising images to present an experience beyond any specific space and time. What are you trying to achieve?Well, you took the words right out of my mouth! The question is: can photography make visible the invisible, in a poetic sense? If I could describe a photograph entirely in words, why bother making it? Can a photograph go beyond ‘fact-ness’? The burden of photography is that it will record whatever reflects the light. But obsessing over what we record is so boring. Even a machine could do that. I want to take away the realness of photography, take people outside of the image. A successful image does not reveal itself entirely. Photography has become so static – but if I pull the rug from under the feet of the viewer, present an image that cannot be made sense of, then I have done my work. I may not always succeed, but I want to see if photography can transport me into the places that literature, music and poetry can take us. And these are places that neither words nor pictures can capture. So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that photography really is just a tool, a way of shifting our attention past the surface. Last night I was at a Handel opera, and it took me far beyond where I was sitting in the confines of the Wilton’s Music Hall. And I often wonder if photography has that same possibility. Installation view, ‘Dayanita Singh: Museum of Shedding’, at Frith Street Gallery, London. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Steve White Perhaps it’s not that photography is intrinsically static, but rather that given the abundance of images and ease of creating them, people have become much lazier in the way they interact with the visual. You mention literature and the opera – there’s a fair case to be made that these require more effort than the careless gaze we tend to throw upon images.Yes. I have people telling me ‘but you make such beautiful images’. I’m really sorry, but who cares? My intention is not to make something beautiful, it is to make people step outside of themselves into a different place. Take my Museum Bhavan series, for example, which was shown at the Hayward. It includes photographs from my personal archive as well as those of my mother’s – they’re classified by themes like ‘Vitrines’ and ‘Embrace’, which I had displayed in specially-made cabinets. People have to bend their heads to look at the images, some of which seem barely there. You can’t pull out the images to look at them, so you’re left wondering. With the Museum of Shedding series in this exhibition, which consists of 73 images, they can either go onto the walls, or into the two storage units and nine boxes that will be shown alongside them. I refuse to disclose any information about where the images were taken, and I’ll leave it entirely up to the viewers’ assumptions. A curtain, a hotel room, a metal pipe – these are not bound by geography or nationality. They exist everywhere and anywhere, in a place built in your imagination. I want to explore the idea of being in a museum where it’s not possible to see a single image, because they’re all tucked away into trunks. The concept of shedding has become very important to me. I still want to make books and create art, but I want to pare my life down to the simplest essentials. We live in really chaotic times now, and one can choose to give up, or go out on the streets and protest. But protesting isn’t me at all, so I am trying to shape my art in a way that reflects the kind of life I wish to live. Do you specifically harness photography as a form of resistance against Orientalist tropes? You must be really tired of people asking you about what it’s like to be an Indian artist.
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