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The Architecture of a Conversation Dayanita Singh THE ARCHITECTURE OF A CONVERSATION DAYANITA SINGH BY JYOTI DHAR 68 artasiapacific | MARCH/APRIL 2014 | ISSUE 87 artasiapacific.com 69 (Previous spread) MONA AND MYSELF, 2013, inkjet print, 30.5 x 45.7 cm. (Opposite page) ZAKIR HUSSAIN AND ABBAJI, 1983, from Zakir Hussain (1986). (This page, top) MYSELF MONA AHMED, 1996, from Myself Mona Ahmed (2001). (This page, bottom) ZAKIR HUSSAIN AND TABLA MAKER SADANAND, 1982, from Zakir Hussain (1986). All images in this article are courtesy the artist. moment. Still a student, she was invited to accompany Hussain and his peers on their travels and ended up documenting the maestro’s rise to fame over the next six years. The result would be Singh’s first publication (and her design project for her final year at NID), Zakir Hussain (1986). The book is comprised of black-and-white photographs, ranging from sequential shots of the musical prodigy performing on stage with his father— the famed tabla player Allah Rakha—to close-ups of Hussain joking around with his daughter and nephew, as well as ethereal portraits of him looking up at the sky or gazing back at the viewer intensely from behind his tablas. Just as the tablas appeared to become an instrumental extension of Hussain’s being, so did the camera for Singh. Even at this early stage, she began to have a sense that it was not necessarily photography but different ways of working with photographs that intrigued her. Regardless of this, the impact of Hussain’s paternalistic mentoring on Singh was profound. “Zakir took it upon himself to become my guru,” she recalls. “I received the best training I could ever have got. I understood the importance of focus and most of all I understood rigor.” Singh and Hussain would talk for hours, about life, loss and the importance of riyaz— the highly disciplined practice necessary to hone one’s skills. At a time when she was interested in learning the flute, calligraphy and massage, among other skills, Hussain is said to have advised her, “Keep the focus on what you have chosen to do. Don’t give in to “You see, it’s not me,” says the 52-year-old bookmaker and the opening of her Hayward show, for which she admits to having every temptation that comes your way. You must push the limits photographic artist Dayanita Singh, describing the impetus behind spent as much time curating the seating plan at the dinner as she did of your medium . and be prepared to give 18 hours a day to her practice. “It’s always in conversation with someone.” In the the show itself. “Whatever I’ve been able to do,” she told her fellow whatever you choose.” seclusion of her spacious, two-floor apartment in South Delhi, where diners, “whoever I am today, I owe to the conversations with certain The importance of pushing the boundaries, and also of never the top floor serves as her studio, Singh tells me about the previous people, most of who are sitting here today.” Yet, while telling me repeating oneself, remain integral to Singh’s practice. After this evening’s discussion with her collaborator and close friend, the about how she thrives on regular input from “key people,” Singh also formative time with Hussain, she decided to venture to New York, writer Aveek Sen, on the “architecture of a conversation.” Excited refers to herself as a “soloist” whose practice requires sabbaticals where she studied photojournalism at the International Center by the idea that furniture and its varying spatial relations may of silence. She refers to the latter as periods during which she of Photography from 1987. Upon her return to India the following induce different types of liaison and rapport, Singh has recently “returns to zero” and pauses to “listen to the work.” The paradoxical year, Singh took on a number of assignments for The Independent, taken to designing bespoke wooden tables, cabinets and benches tensions between intimacy and privacy, stimulus and emptiness, The New York Times and The Times (UK), often with a brief to to be used within her home as well as during exhibitions. The productiveness and restraint, are at the heart of almost all she does. document the obligatory social issues of India—poverty, child labor idea is to stimulate varied forms of engagement and storytelling, The conceptual significance of the khali or “empty note”—the pause and disease. It was then that another chance incident would have whether between two people or between viewer and artwork. The between resonant beats in a composition—was first introduced to a lasting impression on Singh’s psyche and practice. When she was furniture ranges in form from divan-like seating for an alcove in Singh by her mentor (and the subject of Singh’s first book), the world- asked to document a community of eunuchs living in Old Delhi in her studio, which tests out her theory that “the best conversations famous percussionist Zakir Hussain. 1989, one subject, Mona Ahmed—whose first name is a woman’s are often horizontal,” to long dining tables for her holiday home in Singh first met Hussain at a critical juncture in her life. It was her and last name is a man’s—refused to be photographed for fear of Goa. Among these quasi-architectural structures are her “mobile first year at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, being recognized by her relatives in the UK. Singh agreed to drop the museums,” encasing interchangeable sequences of photographs where she studied visual communication from 1980 to 1986, and it assignment, a decision that profoundly touched Mona and earned drawn from her 30-year career, which were included in “Go was also the year that her father died, when she was just 18. Singh’s Singh the respect of this highly marginalized group. It was only years Away Closer” (2013) at London’s Hayward Gallery, her first major mother, nicknamed Nony, held progressive views, and had fought later, in 2001—when Mona, who had since lost her adopted child and retrospective in the United Kingdom. Back in Delhi, in the middle of with her father to allow her to go to NID in the first place. Nony, a been thrown out of the community, decided to tell her story—that a room lined with boxes marked “Nony Negs” and “File Room 2,” as talented amateur photographer, played a pivotal role at this point. Singh eventually published these photographs. well as framed poetic texts and Singh’s own photographic prints, the She did not ask Singh to return home, settle down and take over the Singh’s first book had received some criticism for not being artist reveals that our interview will be the first dialogic exchange to family’s affairs, as would have been customary for the eldest child sufficiently personal, but Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) was praised as test her latest prop—a stylized, square table. in such circumstances, but told her, in Singh’s words, to “go, be an affecting and genuine portrait of emotional anxieties and of the After discussing various authors who have influenced her over the happy, study . have as many lovers as you want, but think carefully intense relationship between artist and subject. As a woman from a years, Singh explains how she has come to think of the surrounding if you want to get married or not, because I don’t think you’re the wealthy, upper-class family in Delhi, Singh admits that photography photographs as “just 15 words on the wall,” to be used in the same marrying kind.” Shortly after, Singh met Hussain backstage at one of was the only possible meeting point for Mona and herself. Having way a writer would draw from their own extensive, reiterative his concerts, in an infamous incident in which she fell over, shouted first documented the life of a sought-after celebrity, Singh had now vocabulary. It soon becomes clear how important language and and sulked, apparently charming the bemused young musician in ventured into the territory of a neglected outcast. Through her communication are to Singh, a fact she recently acknowledged at the process. “And then the world just opened up,” Singh says of the time with Mona, Singh learned what it was like to not always be 70 artasiapacific | MARCH/APRIL 2014 | ISSUE 87 Features artasiapacific.com 71 (Opposite page, top) BALLERINA CHAIR, 2003, from Chairs (2005). (Opposite page, bottom) SAMARA AND POOJA MUKHERJEE, 1996, from Privacy (2004). (This page) BOOK BINDING, 2006, from “Go Away Closer” series (2007), silver gelatin print, 25.4 x 25.4 cm. understood by one’s own social circle, to surround oneself instead Singh began to challenge the prescriptive frameworks of the gallery with a chosen family and, most importantly, to take the unexpected world, including print editions for photographs, standard framed path. Rather than attempting to represent “the unrepresented,” formats and the role of exhibitions themselves. Cultural theorist as would be more typical of documentary photography in India— and critic Ranjit Hoskote has talked about the superfluous nature such as that practiced by the country’s first female photojournalist, of exhibition-making in his extensive writings and even proposed Homai Vyarawalla, who incidentally met Mona and Singh before the library as an alternative form. Singh was beginning to realize her death in 2012—Singh’s photographs started to enter a space of that, for her, the book was the most natural and yet versatile form fantasy and intersubjectivity. The partly staged, partly unprompted of exhibition. monochromatic images in Myself Mona Ahmed vary from Mona It was in 2007 during the making of a new book, Go Away Closer, gracefully posing in the manner of a 1950s film heroine, to an aged, however, that, as Singh recalls, “all hell finally broke loose, and distraught Mona seemingly caught off-guard as she clings to a baby suddenly the rules weren’t there.” The realization came when Singh monkey.
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