Dayanita Singh @ Frith Street Gallery

For Dayanita Singh photography is a starting point rather than an end in itself. Her work pushes the boundaries of the form, examining how we might display and thereby think about the photographic image. Most notable are her experiments in bookmaking as well as her portable ‘museums’; large wooden structures that can be placed and opened in various configurations, each holding varying numbers of images within what she has termed “photo-architecture.”
Museum of Shedding is a space that we can imagine the curator of a museum occupying. There is a bed, a desk, a bench, a table, a stool, and storage for the museum’s collection, which consists of black and white photographs of architecture; images of temples, hotels, and palaces as well as more humble domestic spaces. A mixture of ancient and contemporary, but all linked by an austere, pared down beauty. The gallery walls are ready to show the museum’s collection, rows of nails suggesting endless possibilities for display, sequencing and editing. Museum of Shedding is a meditative work that ruminates on the artist’s relationship to photography, to the archive and to her own practice as a kind of “home.”