Dayanita Singh

Singh has gained international esteem for the highly expressive and poetic quality of her photographs. The exhibition includes her earlier documentary work in black and white as well as her latest, more abstract series in color. Singh started out as a photojournalist but, at the beginning of the nineties, aimed her camera increasingly at her own surroundings. This gave rise to the formal and monumental portrait series of her family and friends from well-to-do circles in Calcutta and Bombay. Many of her photographs are moreover about absence, about people who have gone or will go away. Their absence becomes palpable in unoccupied rooms, empty spaces and remarkable still lifes of everyday objects. Also in her most recent series Dream Villa (2010) people are emphatically absent, while nonetheless omnipresent in the details, even in the color and light. In Dream Villa the nocturnal city transforms into a desolate, surreal world that provides endless potential for all sorts of interpretations and meanings.