How Dayanita Singh 'dances with her camera'

Dayanita Singh is radiant: a major exhibition of her work at Berlin's Gropius Bau Museum is taking place to mark her 61st birthday.

Just a few days before the opening, more good news from Sweden came, with the announcement that the photographer Singh, who was born in New Delhi in 1961, would receive the prestigious Hasselblad Award.

Named after Swedish camera developer and manufacturer Victor Hasselblad, the award recognizes a photographer's "significant achievement" each year.

A Hasselblad camera has accompanied Dayanita Singh for decades; it has long since become a part of her body, she says.

For Singh, photography itself is a physical act, a dance with the camera. Consequently, the recently opened exhibition in the Gropius Bau is titled "Dancing with my Camera." The motto also refers to the visitors, who repeatedly have to stretch or bend down in this show.

'Exhibitions have to be lively'

Large-scale photos on the wall are the exception in the show. Instead, Singh has pulled most of the photographs into the space, grouping them together and framing them in teakwood. These constructions form small museums within themselves — for example, the "Museum of Chance" and the "Museum of Dance" — and can be folded up or together to form a screen.

In the process, photography is expanded into sculpture or even architecture. In this way, new interpretations emerge again and again — also because Singh constantly changes the sequence of images. "Exhibitions have to be alive, because that's how I experience my work," she says.

The photographs themselves serve her merely as raw material, which, like film stills, only tell new stories when ordered in a sequence.

Singh's career began in the 1980s. As a young photographer, she accompanied the legendary tabla musician Zakir Hussain on concert tours. To this day, she remains friends with him. "I can't let go of the people I've photographed. I stay connected to them."

Studied in New York, represented at the Venice Biennale

Singh studied documentary photography and photojournalism in New York. Her work was soon published in The New York Times and The Times of London.

One of her greatest successes to date is her participation in the Venice Biennale art festival. In 2013, Singh was represented there in the German pavilion alongside Ai Weiwei, Santu Mofokeng and Romuald Karmakar.

A reporting assignment turned into a life project: Singh's encounter with the transgender person Mona Ahmed, who lived in a Muslim cemetery in New Delhi and died in 2017, still moves her today. "Mona was a unique woman; she didn't allow herself to be pigeonholed by society. Imagine having someone like that in your life: What a role model!"

Singh is a master of light — as evidenced in 2013 through the project "File Room": a sensual journey into the world of Indian archives and their secret order. Working in the archives, "this room full of stories and secrets," was an almost erotic moment for her, says the photographer. "Probably, one day, I will just drop dead taking pictures in an archive. I feel that I belong there."

Singh slips into a jacket of her own design, which contains small-format, foldable booklets — each a pocket-sized museum in itself. She can sell them on the street at any time, she says, laughing mischievously.

Being independent of institutions, of the art market, is important to her. After all, photography was once the ticket to freedom for the young Singh.

Defining your own rules

"It was a medium where there were no other women at the time. So, I could create my own rules about how I wanted to live. Photography  freed me from all the social obligations that were very present at the time: to get married, to have children. Those are certainly quite wonderful things. But not for me!" says Singh.

On the back of the jacket is the saying, "My Life as a Museum."

Life and art merge in the work of Dayanita Singh, who will receive the Hasselblad the award in the Fall —  combined with a new exhibition.

The exhibition "Dancing with my Camera" is on show at Berlin's Gropius Bau until August 7, 2022, after which it will move on to Munich's Villa Stuck.

This article has been translated from German.