When Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan moved, art aficionados learnt about the Art of Losing from Aveek Sen.

Housed in the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) since December 2015, photographer Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan is a family of nine mini-museum structures that both conceal and display over 800 images. Despite this proliferation of images, one’s engagement with Museum Bhavan is not entirely visual. Each museum has a name, two are siblings, and some are growing into each other. Each museum is a moveable structure that, along with the museum furniture, seems to choreograph the manner in which one enters, moves, sits, thinks and remembers within it. It is the form of Museum Bhavan that one seems to be in conversation with, the space itself that dictates the experience that one leaves with.

Dayanita Singh, Museum of Chance MUSEUM BHAVAN (detail)
Dayanita Singh, Museum of Chance MUSEUM BHAVAN (detail) - Being shown for the first time in India, with three entirely new museums and others expanded, Conversation Chambers: Museum Bhavan at KNMA will present Dayanita Singh’s ‘museums within the museum’ as self-sufficient structures that function as sites of display, preservation, circulation and storage.  Bringing together photographs spanning decades of her artistic oeuvre, these structures – which she refers to as  ‘photo-architecture’ – function as repositories that also provide a performative space in which her images come together in infinite permutations to allow for unexpected poetic and narrative possibilities. Dayanita challenges a singular interpretation of the still image through the composite narrative produced within these architectural structures, reminiscing the ensemble of images in contact-prints but constantly shuffling them with her physical intervention. Dayanita’s current practice is constantly attempting to push the boundaries of the medium of photography. She considers the tactile nature of the book, which does not allow for a passive interaction, to be the form closest to her own practice.  She has been equally fascinated by an engagement with multiple shifting views and sifting of time that displaces the fixed position of the viewer’s vantage point, unsettling the reality encountered within a single image, by spilling it into an expanding framework. In Dayanita’s words, “The design and architecture of the museums are integral to the images shown and kept within them. Each large, wooden, handmade structure can be placed and opened in different ways.  It holds around a hundred framed images, of which some are in view, whilst others wait for their turn in the reserve, stored inside the structures.”   © Simon White

One returns to Museum Bhavan on the evening of the 1 May, to find that the File Museum, the Museum of Little Ladies, the Kochi Pillar, and the Museums of Chance, Machines, Photography and Furniture have shed their images to reveal their skeletons. One finds oneself, now, in a museum of emptiness, left to reorient oneself to the bare bones of its structures, to confront the ultimate mementomori: to negotiate loss.

Amidst these empty structures, one witnesses a conversation led by writer Aveek Sen on the ‘Art of Losing’. Neatly sidestepping the jargon-filled precincts of art history and art criticism, the conversation delves into literature and lived experience. Sen explores the relationship between the making and unmaking of art, and the fundamental processes of the human body and mind. What do we get, he asks, when art, which must somehow deal with the “first and last things” , finds itself embodied in something more intermediate: in space, in chambers, in structures? What happens when we take this space, this unit of architecture, this museum, perhaps, and divest it of its collection?

What are we left with?

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