Dayanita Singh: Archivio: Archivio Di Stato, Venice, Italy

Monday–Friday, 11–5pm 

Special opening Saturday 9 May, 11-5pm

Dayanita Singh’s presentation in Venice ‘Archivio' is a tribute to both the Italian archives she has photographed over the past decade and to her own evolving store of images made in Italy over the last 25 years. The exhibition presents 15 new architectural pillars and combines Singh’s long engagement with institutional repositories and her fascination with Italy’s architecture, interior spaces, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers and more.

In ‘Archivio’, the act of photography becomes a form of cataloguing – an ongoing attempt to understand how memory is shaped, structured, and preserved. Singh revisits the 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.

The project continues Singh’s ongoing exploration of the museum-as-book and book-as-museum: portable, re-composable architectures for knowledge. It 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.

‘Archivio’ is curated by Andrea Anastasio and is presented at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, which is open to the public for the first time in its history for this exhibition.

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