Dayanita Singh’s ongoing exhibition Archivio is now on view at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, marking the first time the historic institution has opened its doors as an exhibition venue. The show, which runs from April 17 to July 31, 2026, brings together two connected strands of Singh’s practice: her long engagement with Italian archives and her evolving archive of photographs made in Italy over the past 25 years.
Curated by Andrea Anastasio, the exhibition presents Singh’s archive-based work as a living, shifting form rather than a fixed repository. It revisits photographs made across Italian cities since the late 1990s and places them in dialogue with her broader studies of institutional archives in India and elsewhere.
Archivio treats photographing as a mode of cataloguing and memory-making, while also highlighting Singh’s interest in the “museum-as-book” and “book-as-museum” as portable structures for knowledge. The exhibition is also framed as a site-specific project that will travel after Venice to Rome, Turin, and New Delhi.
The Venice edition opens during the 19th edition of Incroci di Civiltà and will be accompanied by public lectures and book presentations through the end of the exhibition. Singh will also lead a mentorship program for university students in collaboration with local institutions, adding an educational layer to the project.
Dayanita Singh’s Practice
Dayanita Singh, born in New Delhi in 1961, is one of India’s most widely exhibited contemporary photographers, with recent solo shows in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Berlin, Gothenburg, and elsewhere. Archivio extends her long-running inquiry into how images, archives, and memory shape one another.
Cover Image credit: Dayanita Singh, From Venice Pillar 2 © Dayanita Singh/Archivio
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
