dayanita singh

Beds and Chairs
8 - 28 Feb, 2007

Dayanita Singh (*1961 in New Delhi), studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Represented internationally by Frith Street Gallery, London, Singh's work has been shown at leading venues including a solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2003, Das Achte Feld - Geschlechter, Leben und Begehren in der bildenden Kunst seit 1960, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2006, and Cities in Transition, a public project together with Chuck Close and Mitch Epstein in New York City, Boston and Hartford in 2006. Three books on her work, Chairs, Privacy, and Go Away Closer, have been published by Steidl (Göttingen, Germany).
In 2005, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston hosted a solo exhibition of Dayanita Singh's portraits of chairs - images of un-peopled spaces taken during visits to palaces and homes, libraries and museums, theatres and temples around the world including Calcutta, London, Goa, Florence, Bombay and Boston. The chairs may have been in the same place for decades, their occupants having moved on to other worlds. Singh, consumed by this seeming emptiness, simultaneously turned her vision to beds: beds of those who had passed away but that were still made every day, beds turned into shrines with photos and sandals on them, and of course, the beds of the living but without their physical presence.

The two series resulted in a solo exhibition entitled Beds and Chairs at the Valentina Bonomo Gallery in Rome in 2006. On February 8, 2007, Gallery Chemould will present Beds and Chairs in Mumbai.
Later that evening, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke presents Dayanita Singh's Go Away Closer series, a body of work created by the artist during the years 2001-06. Here, Singh chronicles lost moments of intense vision. The photographs illuminate the idea of 'somewhere or other' almost magically, precisely because place and time are eliminated.

In Go Away Closer, Singh creates narrative horizons that remain open to any viewer or reader. The photographer has disappeared completely as a source of information and the idea of the photograph as an all-embracing image of a complete or valid story has been set aside. These photographs look for viewers who will edit them - imaginatively - charging the images that can be gleaned from them with possible stories from their own experiences, informing them with their cultural and psychological cast of mind.