Suitcase Museum

About the Photographer

Singh, Dayanita

Indian, b.1961

Dayanita Singh is interested in the ways people interact with artworks, especially within archives, books, and museums. She has designed and published twelve books—or book objects, as she calls them—expanding the bound format into a more playful and interactive medium that can be sequenced and displayed depending on the interest of the owner. "Pothi Box" is a self-published deconstructed book containing thirty black and white offset printed cards in a wooden box tied up in an embroidered cloth napkin. The front of the box functions as a frame and can be hung directly onto the wall to display one image at a time. The overall design mimics a shoebox full of photographs, where memories and moments become intermingled and exist outside of a linear narrative.

Her "Suitcase Museum" project is a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh’s interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities. Publishing is also a significant part of the artist’s practice. In her books, often made in collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, she experiments with alternate forms of producing and viewing photographs. Here, Singh’s latest is the “book-object,” a work that is concurrently a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue. This work, also developing from the artist’s interest in the poetic and narrative possibility of sequence and re-sequence, allowing Singh to both create a photographic sequence and also simultaneously disrupt it.

Dayanita Singh’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, London (2013), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014), the Art Institute of Chicago (2014) and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2016), among many others.