Dayanita Singh
PROJECT
Dayanita Singh’s video is the culmination of three decades of work with Mona Ahmed, whom Singh met while on assignment as a photojournalist documenting New Delhi’s ancient hijra transgender community. Ahmed was excommunicated by her upper-caste Muslim family and later by the hijra community due to her unconventional decisions about where and how she lived, including refusing to identify as one gender. Ahmed was, in Singh’s words, an ‘outcast of outcasts’. At the end of her life, Ahmed lived in a cemetery in old Delhi, where she died in 2017. Mona and myself is both a love letter and a lament – Singh calls it a ‘moving-image still’ – in which Ahmed sings along unselfconsciously to her favourite Bollywood song, ‘Rasik Balma’, an emotional ballad about heartbreak.
ABOUT
For over forty years Dayanita Singh has defied easy categorisation as a photographer. She has built a vast archive of images that she edits, combines and transforms into various structures, architectures and spaces. Often working with books and renowned for her ‘book-objects’ and ‘photo architecture’, her work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions at museums and galleries such as the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2023) and MUDAM, Luxembourg (2023). She has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including Choreographies of the Impossible at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2023), the 14th Gwangju Biennale, soft and weak like water, in Gwangju, South Korea (2023), and Icônes at Punta della Dogana (Pinault Collection), Venice, Italy (2023). She has received many awards and her work is housed in international collections including Tate, London (UK); Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo (Japan); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (US); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (France); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (US).