FRANKFURT.- With more than seven hundred photographs, the internationally renowned photographer Dayanita Singh is providing in-depth insights into the past thirty years of her artistic work.
Her exhibition Go Away Closer is a museum in a museum: in installations she calls museum structures, Singh arranges her photographs and presents them in structures she had developed as her form. These archives structures stand in the exhibition like open oversize books. Each of the expansive, multiply convertible wooden structures holds between 70 and 140 black-and-white photographs series of works edited and arranged in sequences by the artist, but theoretically capable of being rearranged and supplemented in any number of ways. The photos unite to form fictional narratives full of allusions and enigmas. The artist has given the various structures such titles as Museum of Little Ladies, Museum of Embraces, Museum of Machines or Museum of Chance. She quite deliberately chooses not to label or date the individual photographs.
Dayanita Singh, who refers to herself as a book artist, made a name for herself above all with her carefully designed artists books, which she has always thought of as portable museums. The museum structures have their origins in these books. This special exhibition form lends the images a quality of seemingly never-ending process. With the museum structures, Singh moreover broadens our conception of photography and how to approach it by introducing sculptural and architectonic aspects, comments
MMK director Susanne Gaensheimer.
Singhs photographs, which she processes with superb craftsmanship and great technical precision, are characterized by a balance between empathy and distance. In her pictures, with their underlying melancholy mood, she finds simple translations for complex states of mind. In the photographic essays, countless images of her past merge with perceptions of the present, as in a dreamlike state. European music, literature and movie history are as much a part of the artists work as the people, structures and places of her surroundings in New Delhi.
The exhibition is further enhanced by Singhs latest video work, Mona and Myself, which she produced for the German pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Singh describes the striking video portrait as her first moving still. This film demonstrates the true concern of my work: its like a dream, like the brief moment between sleeping and waking, the artist explains.
Singh first met the films protagonist, the eunuch Mona Ahmed, in 1989; since that time the two have been close friends. Talking about the work, the artist says: Mona tells what its like when you belong neither here nor there, are neither male nor female, neither an eunuch nor someone like me.