http://travel.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/arts/design/30cott.html?ex=1172638800&en=840b508f152bce9e&ei=5070
This article is about the work of a Saligao-based photographer,
Dayanita Singh, whose photographs also adorn the walls of the Saligao
Institute. FN
ART REVIEW | DAYANITA SINGH
Objects of Repose and Remembrance
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 30, 2005
Correction Appended
"I am able to be international because I am so rooted in India," said
the ultra-cosmopolitan Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime
minister. And many contemporary Indian artists might well say the
same.
International they are, for sure, judging by visibility. A big
traveling survey called "Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India" is at
the Asia Society and the Queens Museum in New York this spring. This
summer, the Venice Biennale will have its first Indian pavilion.
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The Delhi-based photographer Dayanita Singh, 44, in particular is
getting around. She has work in "Edge of Desire" and at Sepia
International in Chelsea, plus a solo exhibition, "Chairs," at the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a really beautiful one,
subtly globalist and time traveling.
As it happens, her pictures at the Gardner and at the Asia Society
share a Nehru moment. In 2000, Ms. Singh made a series of photographs
at Anand Bhavan, the Nehru family home in Allahabad, now a museum.
With its displays of the political hero's personal effects in domestic
settings, it draws its share of tourists, though Ms. Singh paid little
attention to them.
Instead, she focused on the objects preserved. Her shot of one of
Nehru's white jackets hanging in a cabinet is at the Asia Society; a
picture of books in his spare, monkish library is at the Gardner. Both
photographs - black-and-white, like all Ms. Singh's work - are
reliquary still-lifes of a specific historical past.
But a third picture from the series, not in either show - you'll find
it in her book, "Privacy," published last year by Steidl - is quite
different. In it, Indian tourists peer into one of Nehru's rooms from
behind a glass barrier. Ms. Singh shoots them from inside the display,
from the perspective of Nehru's ghost, you might say. And dressed in
saris and T-shirts, they seem to be from another world, an in-the-now
India, jostling for space and feeling the heat, in a frozen-time
shrine.
Place and time - here and there, past and present - are the poles of
Ms. Singh's work, although her early training was in the intensely
present-directed field of photojournalism, which she studied in India
and at the International Center of Photography in New York. While
still her 20's she had assignments for international magazines and
newspapers, including this one. And one article, from The Times of
London in 1989, turned into a long-term, career-altering project.
The article was about Indian eunuchs, who form a distinctive social
class within the culture. In researching the subject, she befriended a
eunuch named Mona Ahmed, a bright, troubled, charismatic presence
whose life she went on to photograph for 13 years. What resulted was
the extraordinary book "Myself Mona Ahmed" (Scalo, 2001), a record of
a personal past and present locked in conflict.
Ms. Singh's interest in photojournalism gradually cooled as she
realized that most Western publications were interested in only one
India, an India of sensational catastrophes and human failures. And
even as she produced significant reports on AIDS and child labor, she
was aware that the India of economic privilege that she was born into
was going undocumented in a period of radical transition.
With no market for the story, she proceeded on her own. In 1992, she
started making portraits of wealthy urbanites in their homes in New
Delhi and elsewhere, beginning with family friends and branching out
into a social sphere in which distinctions between "Western" and
"Indian" are in an ever-shifting balance.
This dynamic is apparent in the clothes her sitters wear - saris and
miniskirts turn up in the same picture - but more tellingly in
half-noticed details of interior décor, which range from colonial
baroque to minimalist modern, with endless variations between.
In houses and apartments in Calcutta in 2002, Ms. Singh found herself
taking pictures, as she had at Anand Bhavan, of rooms empty of people
but filled with traces of them: an armchair awaiting the arrival of
one family member, a desk chair vacated by another; a daybed where
someone now dead had once napped.
From Calcutta, she traveled to Boston for an artist's residency at
the Gardner, a mock-Venetian palace built around 1900 as museum-home.
She brought the pictures from Calcutta, and began doing in Boston what
she had done there: evoking resident spirits through portraits of
furniture. An 18th-century Italian chair, for example, facing a tiny
tabletop Raphael "Pietà" had been set in place by Isabella Gardner
herself nearly a century earlier and not been moved since. Her ardent,
acquisitive gaze lingered there.
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Ms. Singh was in and out of Boston a lot during this time, and took
her camera with her. She photographed rooms wherever she went: first
in South India, then in Venice, where she stayed at the home of Fausto
Calderai, a furniture scholar who was cataloging the Gardner's
collection. Finally, four years after the residency ended, she wrapped
up the project with the current exhibition.
It's a solo show that is also a collaboration. Taking their cue from
the 2002 photograph of the chair in front of the Raphael, Ms. Singh
and Mr. Calderai have created arrangements of chairs throughout the
museum. In the room that was Gardner's salon, they've placed them in
casual groupings to suggest a party just broken up. Elsewhere, a
single gilded armchair serves as a screen on which Ms. Singh's
photographs from Allahabad, Calcutta, Boston and Venice are projected.
The photographs themselves, hung in a special exhibition gallery, are
the heart of the show. What's interesting about them is that it's hard
to tell at a glance when and where they were taken. They look both old
and new. They could be Western or Indian. As Nehru might have
recognized, they are, in some sense, both, and the one because of the
other.
Correction: May 14, 2005, Saturday:
A picture caption on March 30 with a review of the work of the
photographer Dayanita Singh carried an incomplete credit. The picture,
of the work "Amnesia, 2004" at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Boston, was by Ms. Singh and Andrea Anastasio. This correction was
delayed by an editing lapse.
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