Opening 16 April 2026
ARCHIVIO is Dayanita Singh’s tribute to both the Italian archives she has photographed over the past decade and to her own evolving archive of images made in Italy over the last 25 years. Opening on 16 April 2026 at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, the exhibition brings together two intertwined bodies of work: Singh’s long engagement with institutional archival repositories and her decades-long visual conversation with Italy’s architecture, interior spaces, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers and more. The exhibition is curated by Andrea Anastasio and will travel to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome, the MAO. Asian Art Museum, Turin, and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New Delhi, India.
In ARCHIVIO, the act of photographing becomes a form of cataloguing – an ongoing attempt to understand how memory is shaped, structured, and preserved. Singh revisits images she has made in Italian cities since the late 1990s, placing them in dialogue with her extensive studies of archives in India and elsewhere. Through this encounter, the exhibition proposes the archive not as a static storehouse but as a living organism, continuously rearranged through the artist’s editorial play, display structures, and re-sequencing of images.
Curator Andrea Anastasio situates Singh’s practice within the broader question of how we construct cultural memory. The installation reflects his interest in the poetic and philosophical resonance of archival labour – ordering, containing, protecting – while allowing Singh’s photographs to remain open and porous, shifting with each new context. As the exhibition travels from Venice to Rome, Turin, and New Delhi, it invites viewers to consider how meaning itself migrates across time, geography, and institutional frameworks.
ARCHIVIO continues Singh’s ongoing exploration of the museum-as-book and book-as-museum: portable, re-composable architectures for knowledge. The exhibition foregrounds her belief that the archive is not merely a place of preservation, but a generative space – one that shapes the stories we tell and those we have yet to discover.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a public program of lectures, in collaboration with institutions, and a mentorship program led by Singh for university students.
With support from the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New Delhi, India; Archivio di Stato, Venice, Italy; MAO. Asian Art Museum, Turin, Italy; and Museo Nazionale Etrusco, Villa Giulia, Rome, Italy. The exhibition in Venice features the collaboration of Università Iuav and Università Ca' Foscari.
Learn more about Dayanita Singh
