JEHANGIR NICHOLSON ART FOUNDATION
‘Photography is fiction in the guise of non-fiction’ – Dayanita Singh
Dayanita Singh reminds us that all photographs are mediated, whether fiction or documentary. Through this exhibition, Singh distils decades of contemplation on photography's elusive relationship with reality. Her investigations reveal the medium's power to both document and deceive. She transforms its inherent ambiguity into a provocative artistic language. In ‘Photo Lies,’ images of architectures from across her archive coalesce into new, compelling narratives through analogue montage, multiplicity, masking, framing and scale.
Singh’s practice offers plural ways of seeing, stressing on an archive rather than a singularity of image or meaning. This finds deep resonance within the museum as a repository of configurations- of stories, ideas and histories.
In her montages, Singh orchestrates these magic spaces where disparate architectures converge in unexpected harmony. Between blurred time and geography, delicate tensions emerge between truth and fiction, memory and imagination. The montages are handmade, by cutting and pasting printed photographs of the same size.
Throughout ‘Photo Lies’, Singh's earlier creations resurface in different guises. Her Museums emerge as empty, sculptural shells that alter the space and vantages for visitors to move through the exhibition. While File Museum is shown in its bare structure, the photographs it once held, now reappear as montages in Mona in the archive, and again, as shrouded traces in Painted Photos.
By reframing her ongoing archive, Singh reveals her practice as a layered performance, where meanings shift and evolve like scenes in an ever-changing masquerade.
‘Photo Lies’ extends into the CSMVS Museum, with interventions in the Textile and Natural History galleries.
PHOTO LIES features Dayanita Singh's works from 2019-2024, presented for the first time in India at the JNAF gallery. The works include selections from Singh's international survey exhibition 'Dancing with my Camera’ (2022, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal) , alongside new works created for 'Photo Lies’. The upcoming catalogue will include an essay by Dr. Jyotindra Jain.
With special thanks to Frith Street Gallery, London & Nature Morte
Preview: 21st November
On view till 23rd February 2025
Curatorial note:
