About the Exhibition
Can a book be both a book and an exhibition?
And can a book, shown on a wall as a work, also become a catalogue of its very exhibition?
With ‘Museum of Chance’, Dayanita Singh has achieved all of this, creating a work that is simultaneously a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue.
A book with 88 images and a short text by Aveek Sen, ‘Museum of Chance’ transforms into a book-object and exhibition when its 88 different covers are placed inside specially constructed wooden structures and displayes on a wall. In placing the book directly onto the wall in this way, Singh departs from simply just showing edition prints framed on a wall, turning the book itself into the art object: a work to be valued, looked at and read as such, rather than being simply regarded as a gathering of photographic reproductions.
Dayanita Singh is an artist. Her medium is photography and the book is her primary form. She was born in 1961 in New Delhi. She 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 twelve books: Zakir Hussain (1986), Myself, Mona Ahmed (2001), Privacy (2003), Chairs (2005), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent A Letter (2008), Blue Book (2009), Dream Villa (2010), Dayanita Singh (2010), House of Love (2011), File Room (2013), and Museum of Chance (2014).