‘Retrospective’ is a tricky word to apply to Singh, despite her largest-ever exhibition, Dancing with my Camera, which looks back over her three-decade career, touring to Mudam, Luxembourg, and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, this year (after stops in Gropius Bau, Berlin, and Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, in 2022). For Singh’s work is in constant flux: the artist seeks out new arrangements from her vast archive of images and exhibits them as ‘minimuseums’ of concertinaed books and portable display walls; her unusual formatting encourages viewers to play a role in the sequencing of her photographs, allowing a democratic sensibility to permeate her work. At both the Gwangju and São Paulo biennials this year, she presented these alongside a regular foray into moving image with Mona and Myself (2013), a video portrait of Mona, a third-gender eunuch whom Singh met during the 1980s, and who became a close friend and muse to the artist. Long before questions of gender identity were a mainstay in the artworld, Singh was investigating this, and other subjects pushed to the margins of society, with a keen eye and great empathy.
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Power 100
Most influential people in 2023 in the contemporary artworld
78
Dayanita Singh
Artist - Disrupts photography through innovative photobooks and exhibition formats
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