It’s 4 p.m. and soft afternoon light is streaming through the main doorway of the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla, falling on the Victorian architecture and stucco work that paints the museum’s interior edifice. Right behind the marble bust of David Sassoon, (the treasurer of Baghdad between 1817 and 1829 and then the leader of the Jewish community in what was known as Bombay then), lies a rather curious wooden panel that opens and closes, much like a book, and is fitted with both old and new black-and-white photographs.
Artist (she dismisses the term photographer) Dayanita Singh is scurrying in between the wooden panels, arranging and re-arranging photographs that are part of nine movable museums, largely known as ‘ Museum Bhavan’ . Our eyes shift from one photograph to the next, some with portraits of herself clicked by her mother, Nony, others of her close friend Mona Ahmad, who struggled with being a eunuch as part of a rather marginalised society, and then one of Sunil Dutt tying a turban on son-in-law Kumar Gaurav’s head. Some of the panels even house artwork and stills that house her inspirations. For example, as Singh moves around the structure to form a labyrinth, we spot a still of Nargis Dutt from Shree 420, and Vikram Seth’s poem ‘Mistake’.
“I smiled at you because I thought that you, were someone else; you smiled back; and there grew, between two strangers in a library…” read the words in the central panel of the portable museum. Singh catches me reading the poem closely and says “My life, and similarly my photography, is an entire series of chance encounters, as I’m sure is yours. So, I wanted to create a museum that’s dedicated to that kind of chance, a place that allowed me to sift through 30 years of my work to create something that’s ongoing.”
Singh’s ongoing show, ‘ Suitcase Museum ’, is part of a series of curated exhibitions at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad, titled ‘Engaging Traditions’, which invites artists to explore the museum’s collection, and engage with its history and tradition with a contemporary perspective.
Singh’s book Museum Of Chance (Steidl 2015) is a sequence of 88 images taken through her career, which challenges the traditional norms of chronological photo stories. The photographs are instead sequenced using the rhythms of chance.
“Every one of my exhibitions has a reserve of photographs that I can pull out to change the dynamics of the museum, as and when the mood calls for it,” says Singh, whose work is displayed across the walls of a space that once inspired her work.
The exhibition brings together over 400 of Singh’s photographs in various forms spread across four galleries in the museum.
This includes a collection of ‘book-objects’, which Singh describes as works that are simultaneously a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue. They are displayed in customised wooden frames, along with two suitcases that are lined with mounts, much like pages, with photographs at the front and back. There’s even an ‘unbound book,’ plastered across the walls that explore 31 images across her travels in Kerala.
“I don’t see my photographs as a matt [image] with a frame on the wall, but more of a physical engagement with photography. We often forget that museums are less about just looking at the artwork and more about interacting with it,” Singh says, as she switches around the framed photographs around the room to form a pattern on one of the white-washed walls.
One of the rooms is lined with a series of portraits from Singh’s latest work, which consists of meticulously photographed bundles, each with a different shape, knot, and faded colour depending on the period it was exposed to the sun. In ‘Time Measures’, the photographs personally evoke a melancholic mood that brings together thoughts of longing, nostalgia, and unravelling secrets and memories that are often shut away. “We ponder about how to make a great narrative, but I strive to discover just how much a photograph can conceal. I’ve felt like an image is what’s outside the frame; I want to make spare images, I want to give very little away,” Singh says before she ask us if we think photography can take you to a place that poetry or music can.
As I sit across the table from her with a folding museum in the already present museum as the backdrop, Singh talks about her ‘Museum of Shedding.’ A meditative work with minimalistic images of architecture that only seem complete with a make-shift bed, desk and bench.
“I think one of the problems with viewing images is the ‘factness’ of it. For me, I only make a photograph if I feel like it can evoke something else. All of these ‘facts’ get in the way of the magic of photography,” Singh adds as she gets up to circle her installation.
As we continue to talk about photography, Singh dismissively asks why I focus on the moment of a photograph when her work explores the “ongoingness” of that very moment.
“My photographs are my raw material, I have to put them out to see what form they suggest, they aren’t ‘things’ in themselves,” she says. For example, while ‘Museum of Chance’, has been deemed as a retrospective of her own work, Singh sees it as her very first exhibition.
“It’s almost as if all my work culminated to form this very installation. The edit took two years to get through, like an orchestra that tries to make everything come together.” she says.
For Singh, being an artist means that work doesn’t stop once it is presented, but continues as visitors bring forth their own perceptions and ideas to the table. With an exhibition like this, there’s room to experiment with permutations and combinations that the artist herself might have overlooked. And this is what Singh aspires to encourage.
But it’s important as a viewer, “to get past the photo-photoness of things” she says emphatically.
Suitcase Museum is on at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Byculla until February 21
