There was a time when photographer Dayanita Singh would be ‘intimidated’ by galleries and museums. That phase, it seems, is over in her life. She is now trying out new spaces where viewers can see her photographs not just as art but also read them as text. Keeping aside the entire debate on whether a photograph is art or text, Singh is holding her exhibition at the School of Art and Aesthetics gallery, Jawahar Lal Nehru University till March 8. Curated by Peter Nagy, the exhibition marks the move from the usual art galleries located in plush areas to unconventional locations for art. The photographer isn’t complaining. Why? ‘‘I wanted an audience who would read into my photographs and I am getting that,’’she explains. The other day, she noticed, a student doing Ph.D on Sikh identity lecturing another visitor on her photographs. ‘‘He didn’t know me but I had seen him at the gallery earlier. It was interesting to see somebody else giving a lecture on my photographs,’’she says. Every alternate day, the artist holds interactive sessions with students from different departments of the university, the most interesting of which, she confesses was the one with the sociology students accompanied by Susan Vishwanathan, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, JNU. ‘‘Do you think I would have got the same kind of feedback if this exhibition was going on at any other art gallery?,’’asks Singh, reflecting on the intensity of these sessions.At one such session, Singh shares her process of clicking pictures with the student group and how sometimes her subjects start expecting things from her. As she explains the images that she had clicked immediately after the 1984 riots, one of the students comes up with a couple of on-the-spot interpretations: ‘‘The picture in which five male members are sitting holding the photos of their spouses they lost during the riots is very posed. They are objectifying themselves. The menfolk of the family it looks are asking for mercy whereas the other one in which one of the kids is pointing a gun at another child while playing is very natural.’’ Albeit excited to have such a reflective and responsive audience in students, Singh wasn’t too interested in having a session with the students of Delhi College of Art and Mass Communication from Jamia Milia Islamia University — to her surprise, however, she found that ‘‘They were really curious.’’ She hopes to take this exhibition to IIT, the IIMs and the National Institute of Design. Ask her if she is trying to break away from the conventional gallery space in order to find a wider range of audience and she says, ‘‘I won’t say that I am doing something as drastic as that. It was an opportunity which came my way and I grabbed it.”
