Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera

Gropius Bau, Berlin

18 March–7 August 2022

Opening Day | 17 March 13.00–22:00 

 

The Gropius Bau is pleased to present Dancing with my Camera, the first major survey of the internationally renowned artist Dayanita Singh.

 

This exhibition showcases the work of Dayanita Singh, an artist redefining what photography can be today. Beginning in the 1980s, she has pioneered a genre-defying approach to photography, one that pushes the limits of the medium and the boundaries of how we experience images. Singh liberates the photo from the wall, and the book from the bookshelf, to create unique forms of display and dissemination. For the first time, we will be able to see all of Singh’s works together and understand how her photographs ask for, and find, time and again, a new form.

 

For Dayanita Singh, the labour of photography lies not in the making of images but in conceptualising the forms within which they can grow. She challenges us to envision new, more mobile, accessible and fluid forms of exhibitions and museums. Her works traverse genres, forms and spaces – from mobile museums to book-objects, to books that become exhibitions themselves.

 

Dancing with my Camera presents the key works of Singh’s oeuvre: starting with I am as I am (1999) and Go Away Closer (2007), to her most recent projects, Let’s See (2021), Museum of Dance (Mother Loves to Dance) (2021), Museum of Tanpura (2021), Mona Montages (2021) and Painted Photos (2021–2022) that will be shown for the first time ever at the Gropius Bau.

 

For Singh, photography is the raw material, rather than an end in itself. Over forty years, she has built a vast archive of images that she has mined especially for this exhibition. Her images are activated in relation to the unique forms that she creates for them. In Dancing with my Camera, Singh takes us on a journey by way of an ongoing chorus of images. Along the way, we meet friends and acquaintances whom she has photographed over decades in formal and intimate spaces, within family homes and bureaucratic archives, and dancing in green rooms or cemeteries.

“After looking through an archive of four decades, I realised it barely matters what I photographed and how I photographed. What matters is that I photographed and photographed relentlessly, often the same places, people, year after year, decade after decade. That is the work.” — Dayanita Singh  

Full Press Release

 

Gropius Bau Website

 

 


 

 

 

Events

 

Online Exhibition Tour | 16 March, 15.00 CET / 14.00 GMT

Instagram Live Tour: Dayanita Singh and Stephanie Rosenthal 

 

 

In-Person Talk | Saturday 19 March, 3–4pm

Book Building: Dayanita Singh and Gerhard Steidl

 

 

In-Person Artist Talk | Saturday 19 March, 5–6.30pm

Ongoing Conversations: Dayanita Singh and Stephanie Rosenthal

18 Mar 2022