Dayanita Singh

This exhibition presented for the first time in Spain, the work of Indian photographer Dayanita Singh, one of the most respected photographers on the international scene. The show, beyond any simple categorization or classification, offered a broad vision of the different realities of contemporary India.

The exhibition

A creator of intense and wide-ranging work, Dayanita Singh (New Delhi, 1961) is one of India’s most international artists. Her work has been exhibited in many institutions in New York, Boston, Berlin and Turin, and in 2008 she was awarded the Harvard University Art Museum’s Robert Gardner Fellowship and the prestigious Prince Claus Award.

The work of Dayanita Singh is characterized by the search for what lies at the meeting place between limits and ambiguity, both in her portraits of people and in images of places. Her photographs explore the world of absence and presence, of the intimate and the private, interrogating the relationship with the photographed element in a kind of performance.

The exhibition, which presented the artist’s work for the first time in Spain, charted her evolution, from her first, more documentary photographs in 1989 to more personal images.  The 110 works that made up the exhibition provided us with an emotional overview of the artist’s work.

Her first black-and-white photographs focused on personal dramas, “on stories”, in the artist’s own words, “that are experienced behind closed doors“.  Starting in the 1990s, Dayanita Singh turned towards more personal matters with images of women and families photographed in a private context, which allows for the discovery of social, cultural and religious portrayals. Leaving this type of portraiture behind, the exhibition showed us other photographs in which empty spaces predominate. These suspended moments, some in black-and-white and others in color, emerge naturally in the work of Dayanita Singh.

Dayanita Singh finds her greatest inspiration in literature and music. From Michael Ondatjee to Italo Calvino to W. G. Sebald, reading and literature become the photographer’s inspirational companions.

Press kit (574 KB)