"One has to free oneself of the idea of what a good photograph is,” says Delhi-based photographer Dayanita Singh, while giving viewers a walkthrough of her new exhibition Photo Lies at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation gallery in Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) (November 22, 2024 - February 23, 2025).

This is not something that one expects to hear from a photographer. Yet it seems entirely in keeping with Singh’s oeuvre, which delights in pushing the boundaries of what is possible when one explores the medium of photography over a lifetime. When prodded to elaborate, Singh, who is feted for her mobile museums, says, “If you photograph with a certain intention, that’s how the photograph will be. But then what? Photography is equally about dissemination to me as it is about making the image.”

The motley group of artists, collectors, scholars, writers, students and Singh’s friends, hang on to every word as they move through the room, where her architectural photographs are mounted on white walls and encased in wooden pillars. These come from Mumbai, Osaka, Tokyo, Venice, Colombo, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi and other places—some more recent, some from decades ago. Among these are Singh’s photographs of the Kandalama hotel in Sri Lanka, designed by architect Geoffrey Bawa. Singh, however, is not keen on such specifics. She wants to liberate her images from fixed contexts and meanings so that the viewer is free to approach and interpret them in their own way. “I am toppling geography and time. I hate being asked when and where a photograph was taken. It does not matter. I have mixed them all up,” she says.

Singh points out that the single image does not interest her at all. She is more invested in building, accumulating and honing an archive of images. “If you look at my pictures of Kishori Tai (Hindustani classical singer Kishori Amonkar) from the 1980s, it does not matter whether they are blurred or grainy or scratched. What matters is that I have those pictures. I think long-term,” she adds.

Her immersive relationship with subjects is visible in the recurrence of forms. One observes a lot of straight lines in this show through images of stairs, bookshelves, grills, windows, cupboards, door frames and other objects that seem to defy instant recognition and description. “I love the simplicity of straight lines and straight cuts, how the light bounces off them. I have nothing profound to say on this but what you have noticed is very much there,” explains Singh.

She thinks that the overlaps between architecture and photography have not been studied as much as they should have been. What excites her is the fact that both mediums play with light. “I cannot believe that a school of architecture would not have a strong photography department or at least some component of photography as part of their curriculum. If a photographer can see so much, obviously an architect could see a lot more. B.V. Doshi used to talk a lot about this.”

Photo Lies, she reveals, marks the beginning of an ambitious new touring exhibition developed by her to engage with the question, “How do you disseminate an exhibition?” Apart from the Mumbai show, she has other ones lined up simultaneously and subsequently, including Time Measures at the Jaipur Centre for Art between November 22, 2024 - March 16, 2025; Museum of Tanpura at the Indian Museum in Kolkata from December 6, 2024 - January 5, 2025, as part of the Bengal Biennale, Travelling Museums at the Indian Museum in Kolkata from January 11 - March 31, 2025; Photo Architecture at the Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad from March 1 - April 27, 2025; and Mona and Myself at Gallery White in Vadodara from March 6 - April 30, 2025.

In each city, audiences will see a different iteration of the large body of work that she has assembled. The show in Mumbai, for instance, has some stunning black-and-white photographs of single-screen cinema halls, some of which do not exist anymore. “I had a very large retrospective in Europe and I was keen to show parts of it in India with new elements. That is the advantage of having a whole archive to tap into,” says Singh, referring to Dancing with My Camera, her international survey exhibition that was first curated by Stephanie Rosenthal for Gropius Bau, Berlin.

Given her fascination with archives, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya—a museum that formally opened in 1922 and was until recently known as the Prince of Wales Museum—seems an ideal location for Photo Lies. Curated by Puja Vaish, the exhibition includes selections from Dancing with My Camera alongside Archivologies I, II and III – a new set of works created for JNAF.

These photographs of what look like decaying stacks of paper, eaten partly by pests, can be read in multiple ways. On the most superficial level, they draw attention to the sorry state of archival collections in India. For the more poetically inclined, these pictures will evoke associations with ring patterns on tree trunks that can be used to tell their age. On another level, these works are resurrections or reincarnations of images that were previously exhibited as part of Singh’s work File Museum.

It seems that Singh does not think of exhibitions as finished products. There is a fluidity and continuity in her work. Intertextuality, which is central to her practice, teases and confounds viewers by making them feel a sense of déjà vu. A photograph’s journey can be quite like the journey of a soul across lifetimes, as it moves from one embodiment to another.

Vaish was interested in how Singh’s practice draws attention to “the medium’s dual power to document and deceive” and how it “finds resonance within the museum as a repository of configurations—of stories, ideas and histories”. Only the teakwood structures from the Museum of Chance and Museum of Dance (Mother Loves to Dance), Singh’s earlier works, are part of Photo Lies. The photographs in them have been taken off. The bare “sculptural shells”, as Vaish calls them, offer a contemplative enquiry into absences that are hidden yet conspicuous in any museum collection as curatorial decisions determine what is included and what is left out.

Singh has attempted to engage in a dialogue with the existing museum collection. The show wanders outside JNAF into the Natural History section of the museum where Singh has placed her work Wildlife of India (2024). Viewers who go there to see dead animals and birds preserved through the science of taxidermy also get to see Singh's wooden pillar with photographs of hunted animals and their heads and skins displayed like trophies. It seems like she is inviting viewers to think about the deep entanglements between colonialism, anthropology and the establishment of museums.

Another wooden pillar, Sari Museum 1 (2024), is in the Textile History section of CSMVS. Featured are photographs of women of different age groups draping the sari in a variety of ways, making the garment their own in public and private settings. Singh’s interventions merge seamlessly, leaving the viewer unaware of any solid lines between what is part of the permanent collection and what is part of the show.

At JNAF itself, instead of concealing how photography engages in deception, Singh acknowledges it and makes it visible. She invites viewers to reflect on the process of making in other works from 2024 like Architects’ Gathering, Ellora Eyes and Make Space that look like contact sheets used by photographers to view and select images from a film roll.

Singh’s work Ellora Eyes, for instance, which is being shown in India for the first time, combines photographs that she took in Ellora (a UNESCO World Heritage site in Aurangabad, India) with photographs of Studio Mumbai founder Bijoy Jain’s architectural work that draws inspiration from the caves of Ellora. It is hard for a viewer to distinguish and this is what Singh wants. “I can do this deception only in black and white. The whole idea of black and white itself is a deception because that’s not how we see the world,” she says.

The use of black and white also reflects Singh’s preoccupation with memory. Her enduring friendship with Mona Ahmed, a transgender woman from Delhi, has been a recurring theme in her work. “She passed away in 2017. We were friends since 1989. It was a long, deep and complex relationship. She was my best friend. She showed me how to live outside boxes,” says Singh, recalling how Ahmed took a photo book (Myself Mona Ahmed, 2001, which is displayed in the JNAF show) that Singh had made about her life to a “Photoshop guy” and said, “Meri Kahani badal do [Change my story]”. Mona wanted to be seen on her own terms. She muddied the lines drawn between truth and fiction by getting photographs made by Singh pasted on gorgeous backdrops from Switzerland that make her seem like a heroine from larger-than-life Bollywood films made by Yash Chopra.

Singh adds, “When I made a book called [India: A Celebration of] Independence with Aperture in 1997, Mona had her pictures placed next to Madhuri Dixit. She cut up the book and made a montage for herself on the wall. That settled in my head.” What Singh learnt from Ahmed’s fantasies flows into her new show Photo Lies. As someone who worked as a journalist in her previous professional avatar and who like all other artists is grappling with the emergence of artificial intelligence, Singh chooses to play with deception instead of bemoaning it yet, albeit somewhat critically.

She thinks aloud about a future where it will be possible for someone to ask artificial intelligence to create a photograph of the Gateway of India that will look like the work of Dayanita Singh. She says, “We have to understand the deceptions that are inherent in the medium of photography and the deceptions that are going to be imposed on it with all the new technology coming in. I cannot even say where we will be five years from now. It seems too easy at one level, doesn’t it? For me, art is all about rigour—riyaaz and tapasya.”