Dancing With My Eyes Closed: Archive, Body and Chance in the Work of Dayanita Singh

Berlin : Hatje Cantz, 2022, 243p. ill. en noir et en coul. 25 x 19cm, eng
Biogr.
ISBN : 9783775751766. _ 40,00 €
Sous la dir. de Stephanie Rosenthal. Préf. de Michael Buhrs, Bettina Steinbrügge, Philippe Vergne
Texte intégral
- 1 The extensive solo exhibition Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera was organised by Gropius Bau ( (...)
1While walking through Dayanita Singh’s exhibition Dancing with my Camera on a rainy summer day at Mudam Luxemburg1, I suddenly feel the urge to listen to music with my eyes closed. Not because the carefully curated exhibition would lack in visual complexity, rhythm or sensuality. Rather because I sense that my analytical eye, trained in Western art history, is constantly searching for new reference points in order ‘to make sense’, and therefore risks missing one of the main keys to understand Singh’s œuvre: the role of intuition, chance and body knowledge.
- 2 Weski, Thomas. “On the Photography of Dayanita Singh”, Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, Berl (...)
2Born 1961 in New Delhi in post-independent India, Dayanita Singh decides to study visual communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad which modelled its teaching on avant-garde movements of Bauhaus.2 Early on in her studies she met famous tablar player Zakir Hussain who became her friend and spiritual teacher, after Singh joined and documented him with her camera on tour over a period of six winters. Singh’s first photographic project, the book Zakir Hussain: A Photo Essay (1986), is the beginning of an artistic journey that uses photography as a medium and as a tool to question its documentary legacy, pushing the inherent limitations of materiality and display. The photo book is a form that Singh will return to and play with for the rest of her artistic career, offering a way to liberate the image from the flatness of the wall and play with the intimate relationship of the reader by adding structure, movement and chronology.
Dayanita Singh, Museum of Tanpura, 2021 and Musician’s Bus, 2021. Installation view Dancing with my Camera, Gropius Bau, Berlin. 18 March–7 August 2022. Photo: Luca Girardini. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
3The photo series Musician’s Bus (2021) takes the haptic form of an accordion-like leporello and is composed of a reproduction of her early images of Hussein on tour, witnessing the intimacy of every-day life within the band. Characterised by spontaneity, closeness and joie de vivre, the images are not interested in documenting specific public events but use photography as a shared, intimate encounter, a medium of participation to depict transient moments of sleeping, laughing and rehearsing. Numerous photographs are arranged on the edge or cropped, evoking the question what is depicted beyond the edge of the frame, referring to the viewer’s own imaginary. How must it have been for 20 years-old Dayanita Singh to participate in the male-dominated environment of a classic Indian music star, I wonder? In what way did the specific sound and rhythm of Hussein’s music influence her visual practice? And how do the eye, the ear and the body correspond and interact in her work?
- 3 Palchoudhuri, Ahona. “To Play A Piece of Photography”, ibid., p. 74
- 4 Ibid.
4Singh’s desire to “build symphonies with images” is according to cultural anthropologist Ahona Palchoudhuri not just a metaphor to treat photographs as raw material to be composed like an orchestral conductor.3 Instead, Palchoudhuri finds a deep-routed musical technique embedded within Singh’s artistic practice that establishes connections between sound and photography, notions of tones, temporalities, rhythms and even silence. In contemporary ethnomusicology Indian classical music is not simply described as a form of musical representation but as an on-going effort to “attune to and render the relationship between time and mood”.4 Based on the scalar system of raag (from Sanskrit rāga, "the act of colouring or dyeing"), a melodic framework for improvisation, each raag provides the musician with a musical structure within which to improvise. Different to classical European music where the form relies on a pre-composed musical score that is memorised and reproduced, every raag relies on the musician’s ability to develop temporal rhythm into aesthetic experience.
- 5 Rosenthal, Stephanie. “Dancing With My Camera”, ibid., p. 29
- 6 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, vol. 16, no.3, 1 October 1975, p. 6- (...)
5As manifested in the title of the exhibition Dancing With My Camera, Singh often describes the act of taking a photograph as a dance, a constant movement, in which the camera becomes part of her body or “her third breast”, as she calls it.5 Mainly using a Hasselblad that she places in front of her belly and not on a tripod or in front of her eyes, she locates the camera in the area of the sacral chakra: known as Svadhisthana, which could be translated from Sanskrit with “where your being is established “, this distinct body region stands for creativity, sensuality and procreation in Hindu Tantrism. Shooting a picture from the belly, and not from eye level, also allows her to get into eye contact with the depicted subject in order to see and to be seen. This technique is fundamentally different to the ‘traditional’ act of taking a picture that is culturally inscribed by a dominant “male gaze”, using the camera as an instrument of power and objectification, defined by heterosexual male desire.6
Dayanita Singh, Let’s See, 2021. Installation view Dancing with my Camera, Gropius Bau, Berlin. 18 March–7 August 2022. Photo: Luca Girardini. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
- 7 Weski, Thomas. “On the Photography of Dayanita Singh”, op. cit., p. 88
6One of the central black-and-white photographs of her recently created photo series Let’s See (2021), shows Singh in the early 1980s from a frog's perspective, sitting barefoot on a mattress in what looks like a minimalist student’s room, surrounded by an overlapping cloud of contact sheets. She looks directly into the camera, her smile is confident, almost defiantly alive. The famous photo of André Malraux comes immediately to my mind, that Maurice Jarnoux took for Paris Match in 1953, depicting the former minister of Culture from above in his salon, leaning against a piano. The carefully staged image shows the writer surrounded by meticulously arranged iconic image material for his book, Le Musée imaginaire, one the 20th century’s seminal texts on the archive. Malraux’s visionary idea of an imaginary museum, a “museum without walls“, locates the creative act in the process of assembling, grouping, editing and displaying images which seems, at first sight, similar to Singh’s approach: Let’s See comprises various, personal black-and-white images from the beginning of the artist’s career which are presented in a wooden, frame-like structure, inspired by contact sheets. This carefully designed configuration allows her to organise the photos in a flexible arrangement in order to generate new relationships and narratives each time. In this process, photography is much more than a fixed image, it is a point of departure as part of a unique editing process, in which the artist intuitively combines and reinterprets the image from her own archive, creating her own framework for improvisation. The photos of this extremely productive period show Singh in Let’s See with her family and friends during celebrations, parties, and ceremonies, revealing that the artist was –in contrast to Malraux’s perspective of the bourgeois connoisseur– "not a distant observer but an active participant in the events“.7
- 8 Ibid., p. 90
- 9 Barthes, Roland. “Shock-Photos”, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang, 1 (...)
7Studying photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1987, the images of this period encapsulate the very subjective documentary style that defined Singh’s early practice before leaving India. However, after returning to her home country in 1989 and working as a freelance photojournalist for several years, Singh became disillusioned of the male-dominated world of photo-journalism and the simplistic, eroticizing visual clichés about India she was asked to reproduce for Western newspapers, such as The Times.8 The very personal photo essay Myself Mona Ahmed, published in 2001, is an homage to her closest friend, the third-gender person Mona, documenting their life at the margin of society, living in a house in the Mehendiyan cemetery in Old Delhi, abandoned by the hijra community. The book, composed of Singh’s images and texts written by Mona and Singh, is positioning itself against a tradition of documentary photography that Roland Barthes described as “overconstructed”9: a visual language that doesn’t offer any imaginative space for the viewer behind the photographer’s obvious intention. Instead, they give voice to the camera’s main subject, documenting Mona’s torn feelings on being photographed, while showing they dancing, cleaning, dressing up together with their daughter, as well as loving self-portraits of Singh and Mona. Characterized by snap shot aesthetic and respectful, intimate moments of love and loss, the closeness of photographer and ‘model’ remind of Nan Goldin’s early work, documenting Boston’s transgender scene in the early 1970s. Still the images transcend Goldin’s approach of a visual diary, as Mona becomes a lucid figure, an approachable icon, of Singh’s œuvre who is not limited to a single photographic series or book but appears in the exhibition parcours at various places: as blown-up Close Up, projected on the walls, as main subject to the series Mona Montages (2021) and as part of a wooden, architectural structure in The Museum of Dance (Mothers Loves to Dance) (2021).
- 10 Weski, Thomas. p. 93
8In the early 2012s, Singh began incorporating her photographs into mobile wooden structures –also described as ‘photo-architectures’ by Singh– allowing her to rapidly rearrange and organise her images in different configurations. This led to the creation of a series of ‘museums’ that combine and subvert both, the principle of the archive and the exhibition. The art museum, as a spatial configuration of inhabited meaning, restores, organizes and categorizes not only art works, but also comes along with a very specific scenography that guides and orchestrates the bodies and perception of its visitors who are taking the role of mainly passive observers. Contrary to this tradition, Singh has developed an open system for her exhibitions that allows works to be rearranged, moved and exchanged, with the aim of creating new readings as well as inviting the viewers to actively participate by intervening in the presentation of the art works.10
- 11 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995
- 12 Azoulay, Arielle Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, London/New York: Verso, 2019, p. (...)
9Singh’s first ‘museum’, the File Museum (2012), gathers images depicting archives in India of various sorts: administrative and governmental archives, staples of documents left on office tables, detailed images of shop storages next to wide shots of corridors full of folders. Between order and chaos these photographs have an almost tactile quality, questioning the logics and hierarchies of the structural systems of archivists. Deeply rooted in its Greek etymology, the word ‘archive’ derives from archon –leader, ruler, and governor.11 Usually seen as an institution embodied in a building, the archive represents state power, ‘objective’ knowledge, and various arbitrary categories of in- and exclusion. According to theorist Ariella Azoulay, “the archive as the realm of documents handled by experts, in which the governed are occasionally its external and secondary users, is yet another imperial epic.”12 By taking over the role of an archivist and creating her own archive, or File Museum, that is not interested in rational logics but uses chance as a main element of selection and creation, Singh subverts the presumed neutrality and (pseudo-) objectivity of scientific archives. At the same time she develops an architectural structure that welcomes the visitors to enter and play with the references in order to create their own narration. The Museum of Chance (2013), Singh’s ‘mother of all museums’, follows this open approach. Comprising 163 prints in total that bring together a huge variety of heterogeneous images related to music, cinema, dance and Singh’s personal life, the artist bases both –the relationship between the images and the act of creation– on chance and intuition. Instead of applying traditional logics of museum curation and image-making, Singh proposes an alternative spatial experience that is deeply rooted in observation, impartiality and closeness. This precious and fragile space still resonates with me long after leaving the exhibition, as it unfolds a form of speculative togetherness and –also– learning about unknown worlds far beyond my own imagination.
Notes
1 The extensive solo exhibition Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera was organised by Gropius Bau (18 March-7 August 2022) and curated by Stephanie Rosenthal in collaboration with Museum Villa Stuck (11 September 2022-15 January 2023), Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (20 May-8 october 2023) and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (February-June 2024).
2 Weski, Thomas. “On the Photography of Dayanita Singh”, Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, Berlin: Hantje Cantz, 2022, p. 87
3 Palchoudhuri, Ahona. “To Play A Piece of Photography”, ibid., p. 74
4 Ibid.
5 Rosenthal, Stephanie. “Dancing With My Camera”, ibid., p. 29
6 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, vol. 16, no.3, 1 October 1975, p. 6-18
7 Weski, Thomas. “On the Photography of Dayanita Singh”, op. cit., p. 88
8 Ibid., p. 90
9 Barthes, Roland. “Shock-Photos”, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang, 1979, p. 71-73
10 Weski, Thomas. p. 93
11 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995
12 Azoulay, Arielle Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, London/New York: Verso, 2019, p. 171
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
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| Légende | Dayanita Singh, Image from Let’s See, 2021 © Dayanita Singh |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/109578/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 111k |
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| Légende | Dayanita Singh, Museum of Tanpura, 2021 and Musician’s Bus, 2021. Installation view Dancing with my Camera, Gropius Bau, Berlin. 18 March–7 August 2022. Photo: Luca Girardini. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/109578/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 74k |
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| Légende | Dayanita Singh, Let’s See, 2021. Installation view Dancing with my Camera, Gropius Bau, Berlin. 18 March–7 August 2022. Photo: Luca Girardini. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/109578/img-3.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 63k |
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| Légende | Dayanita Singh, Myself Mona Ahmed, published by Scalo, Zurich, 2001 © Dayanita Singh |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/109578/img-4.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 69k |
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| Légende | Dayanita Singh, Image from File Museum, 2012 © Dayanita Singh |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/109578/img-5.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 123k |
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| Légende | Dayanita Singh, File Museum, 2012 and Little Ladies Museum 1961–present, 2013. Installation view Dancing with my Camera, Gropius Bau, Berlin. 18 March–7 August 2022. Photo: Luca Girardini. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/109578/img-6.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 87k |
Pour citer cet article
Référence papier
Jana Johanna Haeckel, « Dancing With My Eyes Closed: Archive, Body and Chance in the Work of Dayanita Singh », Critique d’art, 61 | 2023, 156-173.
Référence électronique
Jana Johanna Haeckel, « Dancing With My Eyes Closed: Archive, Body and Chance in the Work of Dayanita Singh », Critique d’art [En ligne], 61 | Automne/hiver 2023, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/109578 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.109578
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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
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