Saligaonetters would know Dayanita as being from the village! FN
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Dayanita Singh/Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
"Raphael, Boston, 2002," in Dayanita Singh's "Chairs" at the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Dayanita Singh's "Chairs" will remain at the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum in Boston until May 8.ART REVIEW | DAYANITA SINGH Objects of Repose and Remembrance
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 30, 2005
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.
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 decor, 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.
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.
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