Dayanita Singh, Venice Pillar 1, 2026
© Dayanita Singh/Archivio
For the first time in its history, the Archivio di Stato in Venice opened to the public as an exhibition venue with Dayanita Singh’s ARCHIVIO.ARCHIVIO is Dayanita Singh’s tribute both to the Italian archives she has photographed over the past decade and to her own evolving archive of images made in Italy over the last 25 years.Continuing till July, at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, the exhibition brings together two intertwined bodies of work: Singh’s long engagement with institutional archival repositories and her decades-long visual conversation with Italy’s architecture, interior spaces, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers, and more.Curated by Italian Cultural Institute director Andrea Anastasio, the exhibition will travel, following its Venice presentation, to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome, the MAO – Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin, and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New Delhi.In ARCHIVIO, the act of photographing becomes a form of cataloguing—an ongoing attempt to understand how memory is shaped, structured, and preserved. Singh revisits images she has made in Italian cities since the late 1990s, placing them in dialogue with her extensive studies of archives in India and elsewhere. Through this encounter, the exhibition proposes the archive not as a static storehouse but as a living organism, continuously rearranged through editorial play, display structures, and the resequencing of images.Andrea Anastasio situates Singh’s practice within the broader question of how cultural memory is constructed. The installation reflects his interest in the poetic and philosophical resonance of archival labour—ordering, containing, protecting—while allowing Singh’s photographs to remain open and porous, shifting with each new context.ARCHIVIO continues Singh’s ongoing exploration of the museum-as-book and the book-as-museum: portable, recomposable architectures of knowledge. The exhibition foregrounds her belief that the archive is not merely a site of preservation but a generative space—one that shapes the stories we tell and those yet to be discovered.The exhibition will open during the 19th edition of Incroci di Civiltà and will be accompanied by a public program of lectures and book presentations, organized by the artist and Chiara Spangaro in collaboration with Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage and Department of Human Studies), Università Iuav di Venezia, and other institutions. The program will run from April 18 through the duration of the exhibition.Singh will also organize a mentorship program for university students in collaboration with Università Iuav di Venezia, on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, and with the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia departments of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage and Human Studies.The exhibition is supported by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New Delhi for its Venice edition and by the Archivio di Stato, Venice. It is organized in collaboration with Università Iuav di Venezia and Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. Special thanks go to Studio Sonnoli for the exhibition’s graphic identity, designed by Irene Bacchi and Leonardo Sonnoli.Andrea Anastasio writes,“She has been persistently photographing Italy. This long-duration engagement has unfolded without spectacle, without proclamation—almost as a parallel archive, one that has grown through friendship, trust, and the slow sedimentation of looking. From Venice to Bologna, from Florence to Milan, from Naples to Turin, Como, and Rome, Singh has approached Italian cities not as monuments to be recorded but as living organisms to be listened to.Crucial to this engagement has been the role of friendship. Access—to private houses, hidden libraries, family collections, storerooms, and otherwise inaccessible spaces—has been granted not only through institutional commissions but through relationships cultivated over decades. Friends have opened doors; they have entrusted her with their histories, their interiors, their silences. In doing so, they have become, in a profound sense, her patrons.This patronage is not economic in the classical sense, though it echoes the Italian tradition of artistic support. It is a patronage of care and reciprocity. Singh cares for the spaces and lives she photographs; in return, her friends care for her unfolding practice. The exchange is subtle but foundational. The archive that emerges from her Italian years is therefore not institutional but intimate—built on trust and sustained by mutual attention.What emerges from twenty-five years of photographing Italy is not a survey nor a documentation, but a relational cartography: a map drawn through attention, patience, and return. Singh’s Italian archive does not claim authority over these cities; it inhabits them lightly. It listens more than it declares.Perhaps this is the quiet radicality of her gaze: in places burdened by history, she finds the present. In cities saturated with representation, she uncovers anonymity.The Archive as a Living FormDayanita Singh’s work unfolds at the intersection of photography, bookmaking, architecture, and memory, persistently challenging the conventions through which images are classified, preserved, and made meaningful. Over more than three decades, she has redefined not only the status of the photographic image but also the very idea of the archive itself. In her practice, the archive ceases to be a neutral repository of the past and becomes instead a living, mutable form—activated through sequencing, circulation, and intimate encounters with viewers.Photography has long been bound to archival logic. From its earliest institutional uses—scientific documentation, ethnography, surveillance, and state administration—the photograph has been invested with evidentiary authority. It promises fixity, permanence, and truth. Singh does not reject this history; rather, she reworks it from within. Her images retain a deep respect for photography’s capacity to bear witness, yet they resist the static and hierarchical structures that traditionally govern archives. In her work, photographs do not merely record; they migrate, recombine, and generate meaning through their relations with one another.”ARCHIVIO is not conceived as an exhibition in the conventional sense, nor as a fixed presentation of photographic works. It is, rather, a living system—an evolving constellation of images that takes form through spatial arrangement and continual reconfiguration. At its core lies Singh’s redefinition of the archive: not as a place where things are stored and stabilized, but as a dynamic field where meaning emerges through proximity, sequencing, and encounter.The exhibition unfolds through modular wooden structures—mobile architectures that function simultaneously as display, storage, and narrative devices. These are not neutral supports but integral elements of the work. They evoke cupboards, cabinets, partitions, and reading rooms, recalling both domestic interiors and institutional repositories. Visitors do not simply view photographs; they move through an inhabitable archive, where each shift in position produces a new alignment of images.Institutional interiors—museums, offices, storerooms—appear not as sites of authority but as environments marked by repetition, stillness, and latent narratives. Objects are often present but rarely foregrounded; instead, they contribute to a broader atmosphere, creating a sense of quiet accumulation.Dayanita Singh stands among the most significant artists working today because she has quietly but decisively altered the grammar of photography. At a time when images proliferate endlessly—circulating and accumulating, often losing depth through repetition—she shifts the question from what an image shows to how it lives. Her work does not add more images to the world; it changes the conditions under which images are seen, remembered, and related to one another.This transformation operates on several levels. First, she expands photography beyond the single frame, treating it as a modular, mobile, and relational medium. Her works exist as books, installations, and sequences that can be reconfigured—never fixed, never definitive. In doing so, she dissolves the traditional boundaries between photograph, archive, and exhibition, proposing instead a fluid system in which meaning is continuously produced through arrangement and encounter.Second, she redefines the archive itself. In her practice, it is no longer a static repository of the past governed by authority and classification; it becomes a living structure—open, permeable, and subject to change. This shift is not only formal but philosophical, inviting us to reconsider how knowledge is organized, how memory is preserved, and who has the agency to shape both.ARCHIVIO holds particular significance for Italian audiences because it enters into a nuanced dialogue with Italy’s relationship to history, memory, and space. Italy is, in many ways, an immense archive—layered with centuries of art, architecture, and cultural production. What Singh offers is not another representation of this heritage, but a different way of inhabiting it.