Truthful Lies

ARE YOU THE restless type who darts through museums, attempting to freeze frames of eternity with cursory glances and a distracted mind? If so, be warned. In her photography show in Mumbai, Dayanita Singh urges us to pause, ponder, dig deeper and listen to the inner hums of human creativity along with the delicate tensions and illusions arising from it. The world-renowned photographer’s Photo Lies at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in CSMVS Museum comes as a refreshing riposte to studies which argue that an average museum-goer looks at a painting for less than 17 seconds. Speaking to Singh, it becomes apparent that there are no cheat codes or short cuts that can replace the deep, meaningful pleasures that a work of art can offer when engaged with closely. Singh has always used her exhibitions to push the boundaries of what photographic imagery can do to human perception, providing a fresh perspective each time on how we experi­ence art and interpret it. In Photo Lies, the winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Award takes on one of her career’s big­gest challenges yet—boldly confronting and exposing the very chimeras that the camera is capable of at the click of a shutter. “A photograph is inherently de­ceptive and Photo Lies is very much about deceptions,” Singh tells Open, explaining her creative process behind photogra­phy’s elusive relationship with reality. “In fact, Photo Lies is such an appropriate title. It sounds even better in Hindi — ‘Jhoothi Tasveerein’. Nothing here is as it seems to be. None of the photos that you have seen are really what they are. And that is something I hope this exhibition will do — it will make people slow down and look, because we all take in too fast and in doing so, we often miss the subtle nuances and hidden intricacies that the images contain.”

Exploring Singh’s series of photo­graphs of architectural spaces, one is reminded of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s famous remark, “Ev­erything that is visible hides something that is invisible.” Her haunting, black-and-white images initially seem to be snapshots of empty interiors, with a Brutalist aesthetic. What might be so special about them? Perhaps, they are devoid of human presence — is that the message? Singh has reached back into her vast catalogue of contact sheets and combined two starkly disparate images from across different times and places to make one master composition, as it turns out. In assembling the photographs, old and new prints alike and affixing them into the wooden dis­play frames that she calls “portable mu­seums,” she assumes the role of a curator with a finesse that matches her artistic metabolism. “The joints in the photo­graphs are visible only if you pay close at­tention,” she says, sharing a trade secret of sorts and at the same time, acknowl­edging her long-time obsession with uncovering the intricate fictions and imaginative constructs that underpin the very art of photography. Puja Vaish, curator of Photo Lies, aptly defines Singh’s vocation as “a practice of possibilities”. Elaborating further, Vaish says, “Though she has created numerous iconic photo­graphs, her work stresses on an archive of multiple images, creating constella­tions where every photograph exists in dialogue with others. Testing and select­ing works with Dayanita in her studio home in Delhi and now materialising the exhibition in the gallery has been an interesting process of relating images through the contexts of the show, and of the CSMVS museum. Her practice finds deep resonance within the museum as a repository of configurations — of stories, ideas and histories.”

In the age of Instagram where everyone is a shutterbug and upload­ing photos on social media hot off the iPhone is a norm, Singh prefers the old-school charms of analogue prints, often using her hands to copy-paste and rearrange images. In Singh’s surreal photographs, multiple realities coexist at once, blurring the line between time and space, fact and fantasy. In one instal­lation at Photo Lies, spaces from Kerala and Sri Lanka share a single frame, while an architect’s 21st-century library in Ahmedabad merges with a 7th-century temple in Kyoto — all thanks to the beguiling interplay that entices us into unearthing unexpected connections between people, places, moments, memories and historical periods. Singh admittedly favours monochromatic portraits for their enigmatic, roman­tic and timeless qualities. “In these photographs, I am destroying the idea of time,” she chuckles, hinting at the poetic possibilities of transcendence. The ambiguities become even more fascinating in a work featuring her late friend and collaborator Mona Ahmed, in which the protagonist is depicted seated against the backdrop of the Taj Mahal. Again, there’s something more than meets the eye, as the photograph reveals itself to have multiple layers. Step closer and you notice the artist’s trick — Singh has superimposed cut-outs of Taj Mahal onto Ahmed’s home in the graveyard, adjacent to a coastal setting which proves to be Mumbai.

MONA AHMED WAS a trans­gender dancer, who lived in a Delhi graveyard. Singh first met her during the early stages of her career and has documented her life and the broader hijra community since, employing a humanistic perspec­tive reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s character Anjum and her world in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. For the Delhi-based Singh, Mona Ahmed was not only a close friend and eternal muse but also a mother-like figure. Ahmed died in 2017 and in Photo Lies, visitors can immerse themselves into what the artist affectionately calls Mona Montages. These slow, deliberate images are not related but nevertheless sequential. Singh admits that there’s something strikingly cinematic about them. As the title suggests, these are montages in the true sense of the word. “Basically, we could have called this entire show Montage. It is a term that comes from cin­ema, where you have one scene followed by another and the story emerges from this juxtaposition. [Alfred] Hitchcock was a master of montage. So, I am trying to do that within photography. I am not even trying. It is happening on its own. We do not know whether the magic is in the architecture, or it is in my eye. Maybe, I have honed my eye so precisely that I can do this,” says the photo artist, who has constantly subverted the tradi­tional norms of exhibition-making and the narrative possibilities of the medium of photography itself.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Singh had the rare opportunity to delve into her extensive archive, which dates to the 1960s. “When you revisit your own work you always discover something new,” says Singh, whose interconnected exhibitions opened simultaneously in Mumbai, Jaipur and at the first edition of the Bengal Bien­nale in Kolkata in late 2024. Photo Lies, in particular, focusses on her works from 2019 to the present, many of them being shown in India for the first time and some created specifically for this show. The exhibition is largely drawn from her internationally acclaimed recent retrospective, Dancing with My Camera which travelled widely across Europe from 2022 till 2024. Singh has always believed that the true power of art, particularly photography, lies in its dissemination. Dancing with My Camera was designed to make art more acces­sible and so, it evolved, transformed and acquired newer forms and discoveries along its journey through different cities in Europe. Singh must be hoping for similar epiphanies with these major ex­hibitions across India. After all, she has often talked about the idea of ‘dissemina­tion,’ which has become a core tenet of her artistic vision.

As part of the Bengal Biennale, the photographer unveiled a series titled Museum of Tanpura at the over two cen­turies-old Indian Museum in Kolkata. A heartfelt ode to Indian classical music, this work was something of a personal milestone for the artist whose own journey as a rookie photographer started through music, when she accompanied the late Zakir Hussain and his peers on concert tours during the 1980s. The musicians crisscrossed India, sharing their music and spreading love and good cheer with audiences everywhere. In tow was an unlikely companion — an 18-year-old girl with a camera recording the trip for posterity and imbibing all the wisdom as she spent the six winters on the road with Hussain and other musical giants. Come March and she will be exhibiting in Vadodara and Ahmedabad, returning to the city of her alma mater—National Institute of Design (NID) where she studied Visual Communication. In 1987, she persuaded her mother that the savings she had reserved as a dowry for her would be bet­ter spent towards her education. Having sought her freedom from the conven­tional social expectations parents have from their children, she enrolled at the International Center of Photography in New York and later interned with the American photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark. Shortly after coming back to India, she discovered the Hasselblad camera which she promptly hung around her neck and started affection­ately referring to the device as “my third breast,” according to an interview in the British Journal of Photography, 2022.

OVER THE LAST four decades, Singh has cultivated an unmis­takably personal photographic language capturing subjects that range from intimate family moments and abandoned architectural spaces to dusty office file rooms and chairs. Yet, photog­raphy by its nature is a “dead end,” she confesses, maintaining that she always sees the image as raw material ripe for metamorphosis. Inspired by a need to break the rules, Singh has conceived un­conventional ways to display her work. Long fascinated by literature, she has worked with publisher Gerhard Steidl to turn books into art objects and has even exhibited at unlikely places, such as a storefront in a shop along Kolkata’s Park Street. But she’s probably best known for her mobile museums. These freestanding wooden installations function as personal museums that can be endlessly played around with. One of them, Museum of Chance, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

These “photo-architectural” struc­tures, as she herself has described them, have been admired for their visual play­fulness and performance art-like quality. “She has toyed with the idea of taking art to everyone through her books early on and her museums, in some ways, are a more robust execution of her vision. She replaced photographs as the end goal through which she creates structures, sculpture, painting and much more,” says Aparajita Jain, co-director of Nature Morte, a gallery that has worked closely with Singh since her first solo show Family Portraits, back in 1998. Jain’s colleague Peter Nagy has known Singh even longer and has been privy to her evolution as an artist. “She has brought the theatricality of show business into the museum space,” shares Nagy, the founding director of Nature Morte. “She makes her own wooden boxes, with help from her team of carpenters. Every­thing is precisely calibrated. Her works are highly interactive. She combines, re­combines, edits and re-edits her pictures until they have something special to say. Here’s one artist who’s taken photogra­phy to a place it hasn’t been before.”

(Photo Lies by Dayanita Singh is on view at the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery, CSMVS, Mumbai, till February 23)

art and cultureart ExhibitioncreativityCSMVSDayanita SinghJehangir Nicholson GalleryMumbai