Chairs - Dayanita Singh

Silent Chronicles

Surrealistic and ironical, Dayanita Singh’s photographs and their inter-relationships requires patient viewing, says Amrita Gupta Singh while reviewing the artist’s twin solos in Mumbai.

Among the many gifted photographers working in India today, Dayanita Singh defies any labeling, intriguing/seducing her viewers with beautifully printed photographs that speak of her intimate romance with the camera.  During the past decade she has almost completely given up photojournalistic commissions and has explored subjects of her own choice, which are of personal significance to her and also articulate aspects about contemporary India. At first glance, her works seem to fall into the genre of straight photography, of informed objectivity and documentary in style, but as one delves deeper, an enigmatic fusion of effortlessness and tautness is underscored, which act as markers of a precise historic past. In the twin exhibitions in Mumbai, Beds and Chairs and Go Away Closer presented by Gallery Chemould and  Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke respectively, her camera records objects in various settings, in their very substance and quintessence, articulating present absences with a sense of timelessness, of being somewhere or other. What is intriguing in these two series is the aspect if what has been left outside the frame, the inhabitants of such spaces seems to linger in the shadows, palpable presences that almost breathe, waiting to step into our line of vision at any given moment.

To quote Aveek Sen, “The photographer, with her Hasselbald, is a participant in the quietly noble defiance of loss and disappearance that human lives often are- without losing sight of, or sentimentalizing the pathos, humour and fragility of that defiance. And she does that with an informing self-effacement that is the peculiar paradox of the photographer’s own absent presence in the worlds of her subjects”.

Singh says that her time spent in Goa has had a definitive influence on her work; her earliest exposure to the photography was through her mother’s camera and later when she photographed the classical tabla player Zakir Hussain in the early 1980’s at the same time internalizing the intonations of classical music.

Banal situational schemes withhold secrets that wait to unfold; sinister and comforting at the same time.

In Beds and Chairs, rooms and furniture bearing the human marks and personal histories of its inhabitants remain empty; un-peopled spaces shot 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 have occupied the same place for decades, but the occupants have left the room or migrated to different places, none knows. The beds and gaddis fall into the same realm of loss; “beds of people who have passed away (Bapu in the Gandhi Smriti) but that were still made every day, beds turn into shrines with photos and sandals on them, and of course, the beds of the living but without their physical presence”- (Dayanita Singh). The beds, though unoccupied, are witness to erotic moments and private histories; they also serve as testimonies to aspects of object veneration that is unique to India. Such spaces evoke feelings of human bonds, bonds that sometimes defy any definition, of human archives that tell multiple stories.

Go Away Closer has narratives that allow the viewer to articulate his own experiential sensibilities with the image, of momentary and intimate situations regulated by the photographer via the element of distance, of a hesitant divergence, ownership and loss. The title itself is contradictory in nature, who is sending away whom? Ambiguous interiors where the human presence is marked by hanging shirts, stacks of papers, rows of scooters in an industrial shed, homeopathy bottles on a counter, rows of empty seats in old Mumbai and Kolkata theatres, domestic and office rooms, are spaces that are imbued with recent departures or could have been shot decades ago. Departure at weddings or the pain of a young girl sprawled on the bed, is this loss of love or a lover’s betrayal? The sinister gloves on a window evoke the idea of absent hands while Nehru’s white sherwani kept in a glass cases in Anand Bhavan speak of the disintegration of the corporeal body, the memory of the man is emblematic in his clothes.

Surrealistic and ironical, Singh’s photographs and their inter-relationships requires patient viewing; departure and arrival interweave in the uncomfortable object-human relationships. To conclude, it would be apt to quote Amitava Ghosh, a close friend of the artist, “What struck me most powerfully is that the pictures are depictions of interior states; they express an inwardness of emotion that is rare in photography…What Dayanita is doing here is much closer to what a novelist does than what photographers traditionally do”.