Dayanita Singh is a remarkable personality and a fascinating artist. In the last five years, through exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, as well as with her two participations to the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013, she has drawn public attention to a decidedly singular body of work that is extraordinary in a number of ways.

She started her career in the 1990s with journalistic photo reportage. She has continued to develop her photography ever since and it has gradually become a distinctive form of artistic expression. In collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, her publisher, she invented unique book formats in which her photographs create new narratives, follow new sequences, and acquire concrete form in the book object – each individual project evolving into the most appropriate style of presentation. In the book Privacy, much to the surprise of everyone, she portrayed wealthy India and its interiors, describing for the first time the world of the middle and upper classes. With the publication of this book, Dayanita Singh distanced herself from the photographic colonialist gaze that is often directed at her country, both from within and from outside its borders; she removed herself from the western-centric double-view that sees on the one hand colourful, bright, exotic India and on the other hand the country of catastrophes, conflicts, and great poverty.

In her book Chairs, she explored her sense of inanimate objects, of spaces, of the silent, still eloquence of things and the latent time in them. The stories (and the history) of individuals, of families, of whole generations, of an ancient culture currently redefining itself after Independence, seem to be engraved in these chairs, tables, cupboards, in the shining polished floors. An evocative, concrete stillness, which rises and falls, expands and contracts, speaks and maintains meaningful silence. In this book, Dayanita Singh reiterates her interest in the stories of people and their objects, tools, machines, her curiosity, which is both anthropological and archaeological in equal measure.

In Go Away Closer she stepped away from the process of documenting and developed an essayistic view and function in her photography, reworking, in a magical, wordless photo-novella, internal and external life, society and personal history, presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, reality and dream, and shaping them into a new and unique body of images. The descriptive aspect of photography begins to withdraw, to dissolve, gradually to disappear into the heavens of the possible, into the boundlessness of poetry. The title Go Away Closer expresses the paradox of near and far, of indistinct and clear, it formulates a movement, a slow internal and external oscillation.

The projects and books Sent a letter, Blue Book, Dream Villa, and House of Love demonstrate how Dayanita Singh’s idea of photography is increasingly open. Every photo she takes is like an open book that changes and morphs, its meaning condensing or dissipating according to shifts in interpretation, viewer or context. This increasingly performative dimension in her photography has recently also manifested in her exhibitions. She develops very individual display, presentation and distribution forms; she builds furniture, carts, and folding screens, or, as she likes to call them, mobile, movable “museums” – i.e. structures that continually give her photography a new appearance and presence wherever it goes, thus disclosing new meanings. Her “museums” unfold a game before the eyes of the beholder, a world between an archive and an exhibition, a collection and a presentation, between cabinet and screen. And at the same time, genres combine and overlap: books become exhibitions and exhibitions become books, accordion albums emerge from books, folding walls extend across the room.

In her exhibition at MAST, Dayanita Singh presents groups of works that all relate to labour and machines, to the production of things, and to the administration and archiving of life. Museum of Machines, Museum of Industrial Kitchen, Office Museum, Museum of Printing Press, Museum of Men, and File Museum are the titles of some of these groups. The selection also includes the projections Archives and Factories, and the installation of the book Museum of Chance. In File Museum, Singh photographs the India of rules, of laws, of proceedings and their archiving. Stacks and stacks of history can be found there, piled processes, layers of experience, levels of time. She displays the world of the archive as a living shadow world, a world of paper, of paragraphs, of files, which are bestowed a milky, bluish, pale illumination under the glow of old strip lights and which appear to perish, rot, disintegrate, yet paradoxically seem also to be alive and cultivated. She shows the archives as dusty places full of hope and pain, maintained by individual people, who act as the guardians of this latency, of the margins between present and past, between life and death. If there were not even a glimmer of hope, says the Indian film maker Amar Kanwar, we would not even begin archives. Although they do nothing but pile up the past, archives are always focussed on the future.

In other series, productive India welcomes us: powerful, smoky factories, thundering machines, operating procedures, workflows open up to the viewers in labyrinthine fashion. In Dayanita Singh’s images, tools, materials, machines appear to come alive, become organisms, creatures, gain a life of their own, a character, with or without humans, with or without workers. A dusty, bleak, greasy world that unfolds before our eyes like a psychological landscape. Or as the author Aveek Sen has expressed it in this publication: “As we spend more time with these creatures and contemplate the spaces of encounter they inhabit or conjure up, what begins to rise up within us is, paradoxically, a sense of personality and personhood.”

Today, Dayanita Singh is one of the most famous artists and photographers in India and indeed internationally. In this exhibition, we see not only her work and her groups of works – we also direct our gaze at a rich artistic life, a powerful, complex, intense personality that has become increasingly confident and more mature over the years. We acknowledge an artist who has successfully struggled on, asserted herself and arrived at the zenith of her field, despite the many obstacles in the way of women’s progress. And she has achieved all this without ever losing her inquisitiveness, her joy in play, in the image, in the flow and poetry of life.