Dayanita Singh: Museum of Dance: Mother Loves to Dance

A photographic archive of dance in its manifold forms, from Bollywood to classical dance

Ever since Museum of Chance (2015), and particularly in her award-winning Museum Bhavan (2017), Dayanita Singh (born 1961) has created museums in book form–little offset symphonies that create a fluid space between the museum/gallery and publishing. Now, in Museum of Dance, Singh collects all the images of people dancing that she made in the 1980s and ‘90s–from her mother, Nony Singh, her friend and collaborator Mona Ahmed (subject of Singh’s 2001 visual novel Myself Mona Ahmed), to classical dancers and the renowned Bollywood choreographer Masterji. Published to coincide with her traveling retrospective Dancing with the Camera, this book is Singh’s tribute to dance, as well as her exploration of photography and bookmaking as metaphorical forms of dance–where rehearsed and spontaneous rhythms combine through intuition in unpredictable ways.