Art & Culture: Dayanita Singh's exhibition at Gallery Nature Morte

Dayanita Singhs latest body of work, entitled House of Love is novelistic in its approach yet curiously elliptical in its multiple subject matters. For the first time in a single series, Singh has combined black-and-white with color photographs, images shot both in India and around the world. Titled Continuous Cities, Theft in a cake shop, Departure lounge, and Being of darkness, the nine stories are tethered to one another only by their circumstances.
The multiplicity of her subjects, ranging from landscapes, arrangements of objects, the interiors and exteriors of all types of spaces, finds cohesion in the recurrent themes: the romance of travel, the mysteries of attraction, and the displaced yearnings of desire. House of Love is the artist’s response to the delirious satisfaction she has found within the works of her favourite authors (Italo Calvino, Amitav Ghosh, Orhan Pamuk, W.G. Sebald, Vikram Seth, among others), telling a story of life and how it is lived in the way she knows how to, through photographs collected into a book.

Dayanita Singh (born in New Delhi in 1960) is one of Indias most accomplished photographers. Her works have been presented in exhibitions throughout the world, most recently as a solo show at the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo. In 2009, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid organized a retrospective of her work which subsequently travelled to Amsterdam and Bogota and her pictures of File Rooms were given prominence in the exhibition Illuminazione, which formed the centrepiece of the 2011 Venice Biennale. Making books is now her passion and she has collaborated with the prestigious Steidl press to create a number of titles, including the seven-volume Sent A Letter, which has been named one of the 200 pivotal artworks produced in the past 25 years in Phaidon Presss Defining Contemporary Art. This is her fifth solo show with Nature Morte, the first being the exhibition Family Portraits in 1998. Excerpts from House of Love have been exhibited at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Frieze Art Fair in London (with the Frith Street Gallery) in the past year. The book House of Love (with texts by Aveek Sen, published by Peabody Museum Press and Radius Press) will be available at Nature Morte during the exhibition, as well as all of her titles published by Steidl and the book documenting her Mapfre Foundation retrospective (published by Penguin India). The exhibition is on from December 16 to January 29
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