Unmoored from the anchors of deep pockets that often hinder imagination, the artist brought her images of archival documents to an unusual venue in the Italian city.
VENICE — For the first time in its history, the State Archives of Venice has opened its doors to the public to showcase an art exhibition by Dayanita Singh. The Indian “off-set artist,” as she calls herself, has long been unsatisfied with the limitations of the photograph placed on a wall. Instead, she’s explored more dynamic formats that use serialization, custom frames, and book objects.
ARCHIVIO, located in Campo dei Frari square in the San Polo neighborhood, welcomes Venice Biennale visitors into a treasure trove of documents that date back over a millennium, including wills, contracts, and other official records that safeguard the rich history of one of the world’s most storied cities.
“I knew that I could make my own systems, that I didn’t have to depend on the distribution of the publishing world or the gallery world,” Singh told me during our conversation in 2018 on the Hyperallergic Podcast, which coincided with her small retrospective of book objects at a New York City gallery and her inclusion in that year’s Carnegie International.
This show continues that career-spanning goal. After giving herself the challenge of achieving all this without major institutional funding, Singh bartered and negotiated her way into Italian archives from Naples to Venice, while finding individuals she calls patrons who helped support her passion for photography’s new frontiers, unmoored from the anchors of deep pockets that hinder her imagination.
“It was an experiment to see if it was possible to really work with the friendship economy and make something outside the very commerce-driven biennale time,” Singh told me during our video interview last week, now online. “We couldn’t afford PR, so I wasn’t expecting anyone to come, and that’s fine too. Even if nobody comes, I did it. But people are coming.”
Her love of archives is crystal clear, but she continues to expand our understanding of how exhibitions can be devised. She even negotiated with local art students, who will be docents in exchange for her professional mentorship.
For this exhibition, curated by Andrea Anastasio, Singh has created collapsible wooden pillars covered with square-format, black-and-white images that give the photographs a historical quality and tell her 25-year love story with Italy. After the show closes on July 31, it will travel to Rome’s Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, followed by Turin’s Museo d’Arte Orientale, before concluding at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New Delhi. Every iteration will present works that connect Singh’s decades-long project to each site.
Though Italy’s archives dominate the series, she includes documents from India, where historical records are often bundled in brightly colored cloths that fade through light exposure, leaving ghostly edges that tell another story researchers often overlook.
While Singh’s work has been shown in and collected by major museums the world over, it is clear that she thrives when she is confronted with a challenge. Here, she shows us that archives are living and breathing things, always in the process of renewal.
Be sure to listen to our 2018 podcast episode, and watch my short video interview with the artist as she guides us through her forest of photo-pillars in the State Archives of Venice.