There is something that happens when you enter an archive. It is not immediately evident. First you smell it – a kind of dust that is not only dust, it is compressed time, it is the specific weight of everything that someone decided not to throw away. Then you see the boxes. The folders. The binders. And you understand that you are surrounded by something nobody looks at, but which exists with an obsessive precision, catalogued, numbered, preserved, as if every piece of paper were the only remaining proof that certain things really happened. Dayanita Singh over the last ten years has entered these archives, in Italy. And she has photographed.
Dayanita Singh, “Mahmoodabad”, 2025 © Dayanita Singh/Archivio
It is not an obvious thing. Singh is not a photographer who seeks the spectacular image, the face lit in just the right way, the composition that makes you say wow and is then forgotten. Singh seeks something else. She seeks the internal structure of things. The way in which a room preserves the memory of those who inhabited it. The way in which a shelf tells you something about power, about time, about the fact that certain documents survive and others disappear, and the difference between the two cases is often arbitrary, unjust, incomprehensible. Now there is an exhibition. It is called Archivio and the place where it is held is – and here one must pause for a moment – Archivio di Stato di Venezia. For the first time in its history, Archivio di Stato opens as an exhibition venue. This is not a detail. It is almost the central point of the whole affair: an archive that becomes an exhibition about what it means to make an archive. A photograph of an archive, inside an archive. A matryoshka of memory.
Dayanita Singh, “From Venice Pillar 1” © Dayanita Singh/Archivio
Singh works with images as if they were physical objects that can be moved, reorganized, put into sequence to tell different stories. For years she has created what she calls Museum Mobile – portable exhibition structures, almost like three-dimensional books, that change form depending on where they are installed. The idea is this: there is no definitive version of a story. There is one version, then another, then another still. The archive is not the truth – it is a proposal. This seems important to me. In fact, it seems one of the most important things that can be said at this historical moment when everyone seems so certain of having the definitive version of everything.
Dayanita Singh, “From Venice Pillar 2” © Dayanita Singh/Archivio
The curator of the exhibition is Andrea Anastasio, who has designed the installation around a precise question: how is cultural memory constructed? Not how it is found, but how it is constructed. There is an enormous difference. Finding implies that it already exists, that one need only look in the right place. Constructing implies responsibility, choices, the recognition that every archive is also a history of what has been excluded. The photographs that Singh brings to Venice come from twenty-five years of work in Italy. Cities, interiors, architectures, friends, archivists, flowers. There is no hierarchy among these subjects: an archivist and a bunch of flowers occupy the same visual space, with the same attention, the same dignity. It is an ethical position before it is an aesthetic one.
Dayanita Singh, “From Venice Pillar 2” © Dayanita Singh/Archivio
The exhibition will not stop in Venice: after the lagoon city, it will move to Museo Nazionale Etrusco Villa Giulia in Rome, then to MAO in Turin, then to Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New Delhi. Each stage will be different – Singh will adapt the selection to the place, its history, its specificities. The same archive of images will tell slightly different things in each new contextualization. This too is a point: context is not neutral, it is part of the meaning. There is also a Public Programme, comprising meetings, conferences, and book presentations, organized together with Università Ca’ Foscari and Università Iuav di Venezia. And a mentoring programme for university students, on the occasion of the centenary of Iuav. Singh teaching, transmitting, being part of something that continues.
Dayanita Singh, “From Venice Pillar 3” © Dayanita Singh/Archivio
Leaving the exhibition, with all that Venetian light upon you – that light that bounces off the water and you never know whether you are looking at the sky or the reflection of the sky – one might think that photographing an archive is a way of stopping time. But Singh suggests the opposite. Photographing an archive is a way of recognizing that time never stops, that stories change, that what we preserve says something about who we are, and that perhaps the most honest thing one can do is admit it and then keep shooting.
Info:
Dayanita Singh. Archivio
17/04/2026 – 31/07/2026
Free entry
Archivio di Stato di Venezia
Campo dei Frari, 3002 – Venezia
www.archiviodistatovenezia.it
Independent artist and curator. Founder of No Title Gallery in 2011. I observe, study, ask questions, take informations and live in contemporary art, a real stimulus for my research.
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