CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/4/2018

Dayanita Singh: Museum Bhavan Conversation & Book Signing at MoMA PS1

Friday, April 6, from 3-5PM, Artbook, Steidl, and The Museum of Modern Art C-MAP Asia group invite you to a presentation of Dayanita Singh: Museum Bhavan, a conversation between Dayanita Singh and Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, followed by a book signing.

Museum Bhavan is a work by Dayanita Singh made up of nine mobile wooden structures, each of which houses images photographed by the artist. When Museum Bhavan began being presented in traditional institutions, Singh decided to find a form that would allow her museums to be simultaneously disseminated in more domestic spaces. As a result, the larger museums were transformed into this pocket museum, a book to be taken anywhere.

Consisting of 10 individual "museums" in book form, Museum Bhavan is a miniature version of Singh's eponymous traveling exhibition, published by Steidl in 2017. With this publication, Singh forges a new space between publishing and the museum, an experience where books have the same--if not greate--artistic value as prints hanging on a gallery wall.

The images in Museum Bhavan have been intuitively grouped into lyrical chapters telling a visual story such as "Little Ladies Museum" and "Ongoing Museum," as well as more specific series such as "Museum of Machines." The books are housed in a unique, handmade clamshell box and fold out into accordion-like strips, which the artist encourages viewers to install and curate as they wish in their own homes.

Is it a book? Is it an exhibition? Is it mass-produced? Is it unique? Is it a work of art? It's all of this and more as Singh invites you to become the curator of her work.

DAYANITA SINGH is an artist whose medium is photography and the book is her primary form. She was born in 1961 in New Delhi and studied Visual Communication at the National Insitute of Design in Ahmedabad and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. She has published thirteen books and her works have been shown in several museums including TOP museum Tokyo (2017), MAST Bologna (2016) MMK, Frankfurt (2014), Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Hayward Gallery, London (2013), and the Mapfre Foundation, Madrid (2010). She has also shown in the 2nd Kochi Biennale (2014), Sydney Biennale (2015) and the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2011).

SEAN ANDERSON is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, he has degrees in architectural design and architectural history from Cornell University, Princeton University, and a Ph.D in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka, and the U.A.E. His book Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea was published in 2015.

Winner of ICP's 2018 Infinity Award
"Offering an intimate look at Singh's life and concerns, Museum Bhavan is a private museum made public, reflecting not only Singh's attempts to make sense of her work and expansive archive, but also offering a poetic meditation on the medium and its rich possibilities to order and construct meaning from the past and the world around us." - Adam Bell, Photo-Eye Blog

"Museum Bhavan ... dispenses with specificities ... it stirs the eye into thought, instead of letting it become fixated on the particulars depicted within each frame. " - Somak Ghoshal, Huffington Post

ARTBOOK @ MoMA PS1
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