Worlds of photography and architecture intersect at this exhibition in Mumbai

Dayanita Singh at the exhibition. Pics/Shadab Khan

We walk into the buzzing Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF). It is the preview of her new exhibition, and Dayanita Singh is already at the centre of the conversation. We see veteran journalist and editor P Sainath in an earnest discussion with her. Around them, multiple photographs adorn the gallery walls with an aesthetic geometry. They are part of Singh's touring exhibition that opened with Photo Lies in Mumbai on November 21.

The exhibition draws from her previous work, Dancing with My Camera that toured Europe with the Frith Street Gallery, London, as well as bringing some new unseen works to India for the first time, Singh reveals. "Since this is a tour, I had to think of a curation to suit every venue. Puja [Vaish] and I settled on this concept around architecture and deception," she explains. The deception is part of Singh's questioning of photography as an accepted evidence of truth.

An exhibit titled Make Space

"Photography, even in documentaries, is deception. I was just having that same debate with Sainath, and he opined that this could be true of photography of power, but not protest," she reveals. Singh's non-conforming idea, to this writer, is not dissimilar to the surrealist painter Rene Magritte's famed Treachery of Images. On being told, she laughs, "You are not entirely wrong. There are 2,000 years of architecture in these images from Pompeii and Ellora, to architects Le Corbusier and Rahul Mehrotra. I have interspersed geography and time. Each of these places [in the photographs] are different in time and geography. The only place they can exist in is here," she remarks.

Many of the montages emerge from Singh's long nurtured photographic archives of architectural spaces. Places such as Carlos Scarpa's Brion cemetery blend into Martand Khosla's Delhi residence; Geoffrey Bawa's structures amalgamated seamlessly into a photograph of Álvaro Siza's works. At one point, photographs of Studio Mumbai and the Ellora Caves are cut into each other with a play of light that makes it difficult to point out the oddities.

A patron views the Bawa Rocks pillar

The artist admits that she worked instinctively when creating these analogue cut-out combinations; "…like a DJ." Echoing the sentiment in her walkthrough of the exhibition, Singh told visitors, "I love it when my architect friends look at a photograph and say, "Ahh Bawa," and I get to tell them "Look again." This show is about slowing down, looking carefully; otherwise you miss the fact that there are pieces of the images moving back and forth."

There is durability in the visions of stone structures in black and white, against the wooden teak frames that interrupt the flow of visitors walking through the gallery. "The frames are shaped by our perception of photographs. These are square frames, and these are 35mm frames," she points out. There are also pillars of three architects - the Corbu pillar, Bawa Rocks and BV Stairs.

Bombay Cinema House Museums (foreground) and Archiviologies

Each wall brings out a different aspect. One of the walls hosts painted over images of photographs giving them a ghostly appearance. This novelty is also the reason she chose the venues, including JNAF. Singh shares, "One cannot always rely on commercial galleries. It is not their role to question norms of photography, or architecture. We need spaces that allow such questions or disruptions of order."

The tour will continue across India till April with stops in Jaipur, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Vadodara. For now, Mumbaikars can walk in and admire the aesthetic beauty between truth and deception.

Till February 23; 10.15 am to 6 pm
At JNAF, second floor, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Fort.