‘I’m sitting in Dayanita’s house in Goa, in the courtyard, waiting for her to arrive so that we can begin the interview. Dayanita will bring her Museum works to London for the first time in 2013 and I’m curious to hear more about how the whole idea developed. Spending time in her house by myself is a bit like wandering through her mind; the Museums seem to have roots here in this very place, because of how one moves – navigating through the space directed by wooden structures – and how the door and window shutters fold and unfold. Clearly, the Museums also have origins in her earlier work and bring together many key aspects of her thinking. We have decided to give ourselves three consecutive days for the interview – starting here in Goa and ending in Bombay, where Dayanita wants to attend Zakir Hussain’s concert. Each day I want to focus on a different subject: the roots of the Museum structures and their sculptural and physical component; Dayanita’s approach to photography; and finally the editing process.’

*Perhaps we could talk a bit about where your thoughts are right now regarding your Museums, but going back as far as what you call your ‘Kitchen Museum’. When I walked into your kitchen, I found a shelf with lots of small Moleskines on it, and you pulled them out and explained to me that these were how you brought into a certain kind of order the photographs you took during your travels with certain people. What was your impetus in making these little books and how did you come to call them your ‘Kitchen Museum’?
*Dayanita Singh: You know, I’m not really a ‘family’ or ‘domestic’ kind of person. I want to just make books, and make work, and think about my work all the time. So it’s sort of a joke to have all those gadgets in the kitchen for cooking, because I didn’t really use the kitchen for cooking at that time. The little books started because I used to go on these amazing travels with friends: friends with great minds – some of them not even friends, just great minds. We would go to places – often the houses of famous people that have been turned into house museums since their death, because they were the interest of the friend I was travelling with, or my interest. That was how we ended up getting into Anand Bhavan, Allahabad, which was [Jawaharlal] Nehru’s house. My friend was doing research there, and I was able to walk around and make photos. It was fascinating to think that the first Prime Minister of India had slept here, and this was the door that connected him to his daughter, who then went on to become another Prime Minister; to notice the Eagle flask that sat by his table. These houses were all museums before the time of curators. They would just have a keeper: someone who would make sure everything remains as it used to be.

‘Keeper’ is such a nice word.
Yes. I want all my Museums in the end to have trustees and keepers. I haven’t got to that as yet. Anyway, the travels would often entail going to house museums with these great minds and I wouldn’t know how to respond to them after the travel. Then, when I came back, I would have these wonderful contact sheets of just 12 images on slightly-larger-than-A4-size paper, because I use a Hasselblad camera and medium-format film. The contact sheets were really like a diary of the time I had spent with the friends. But these were all such amazing people that I couldn’t quite write a letter to them. So I thought, if I make books out of our travels, they might put them in their pockets and take them on their travels, and each accordion-fold Moleskine could, in turn, open out into an exhibition. As I started to make these books for various friends, [author and editor] Liz Jobey said to me, ‘you must keep a copy for yourself’. I showed one such book to [publisher] Gerhard Steidl, because he came to Calcutta with Günter Grass and I had made a book for him with photographs from that trip. I remember this was at the Frith Street Gallery, London. I had an exhibition going on downstairs, and upstairs, in the apartment where I was staying, I had my parallel show, which I would take a few people to see. I had the Moleskines opened out on the mantelpiece, on the windowsill, everywhere. That was my secret show. Secrets are very important to me and that’s another reason why I think. I like museums – because they’re full of secrets and clues…

File Room, was also about storage – the archive.
These structures would not have emerged in the same way if I hadn’t had those two or three years of obsession with archives. In India, there’s no one, single format for the archives. Archivists design their own structures, whether it be metal or wood, and most of the time also design their own
catalogue systems. So there is great individuality there, and I love that.

So your Museums don’t work in the way where you do the drawings and then anybody can make them from the drawings; it’s much more like a developing process, like sculpting something with help from your carpenters?
This is something that is going to be in a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ I’m making for my curators: this organic way of working which is, I think, difficult to explain to some people. Things evolve, things change – they must, and thank God that they do! So don’t try and box me in, I can’t bear that. I want to play with you, I want to be mischievous.

Is it important that we also talk about the form of the contact sheet in relation to the Museum?
The contact sheets, with boxes that were specially made for them, are my unending archives. I did File Room and thought I had exhausted those
contact sheets. Then I start to work on the_ Museum of Furniture, and find all those desks in them. Five or six years later, I return to the _Blue
Book contact sheets, and find all the machines. You keep finding new things on a contact sheet, depending on what sort of glasses you put on when you look at them. When I put on my ‘Furniture’ glasses, I’m looking at them a certain way, but then, when I think of ‘Chance’, I find that there are accidents happening here and there.

The Museum structures make you look at your own work in a similar way to contact sheets, and they are portable and changeable, so they bring all these different levels of your work together. What is the future of the Museums when they come back to your house?
Every full moon they will be open to the public. I’m waiting anxiously for the Museums to come back because all my furniture, then, will go out – I’ll have a big sale – and all the Museums will be placed against the walls. They might even have slip covers, as you would have for furniture, so you can’t see them all at the same time, or perhaps not. Then one Museum would be opened up; you could come, look at it, sit down, read something around it. It would also have an ongoing catalogue with an editor. If he feels that you could write something in it, he might ask you to do so, and the catalogues would build up over time. My bedroom could accommodate an archivist-in-residence, who could be a curator, writer or artist. The kitchen could become the office and reception area. So the entire front section of the house would be the ‘museum’ space, but with the possibility of having dinners in there – a reading space, and dinners. I would then move upstairs. In time, I might add other people’s photos, or the_ Museums could grow organically. Maybe there could be a baby Museum_ fitted inside, say, the Museum of Chance, which then becomes my suitcase when I go to Kyoto. Everything should keep changing, and the Museums would allow that.

So your work is very much like making a house. With the Museum structures, you’re actually building these houses; you are creating spaces for people to look and move in. You choreograph people through a space, and photography, for you, is an act with a physical impact.
If I go to a hotel room or someone’s house, I immediately think of how I would rearrange the room. I’m fascinated by chairs, by beds, and how we use these things in our spaces – hence, by architecture. The home, to me, is the beginning of architecture, of engagement with space. If you go
to a really tiny home – whether in Japan or a slum in Mumbai – observing the maximised usage of space in it, and the notion of privacy, becomes
a fascinating exercise: a study in the ingenious ways in which people live in small spaces. When I bought this house in Goa, my scale changed because, although I grew up in a very large house, it was a house where rooms were added on as and when they were required. My father was always breaking rooms and building rooms, and my mother’s nightmare was coming home to find that there was suddenly a wall in the middle of the bedroom, because he had the idea of making a closet for the other side.

I grew up in a very organic house, where things kept changing, so, for me, the home and its architecture are about being able to change the space according to need, moods, or even the changing light. Then I got the house here in Goa and, once I removed the false ceiling, the scale was incredible, and, since that time in 2001 or 2002, I had the idea that in this vast space, I wanted to have smaller spaces, like little caves that I could go into. I tried to make these conversation corners. Everything was around conversations and beds – I think you can have the best conversations when you’re horizontal. Conversation is key, so the architecture has to allow for that, as well as privacy. After ‘secrets’ and ‘accidents’, I would add ‘conversation’ and ‘privacy’ to my list of keywords.

The Museum structures allow you to rearrange the space in which you show your work in many different ways.
The work emerges over time, and whenever I try to push it towards something it doesn’t work. It has to evolve through its own organic process. It has to allow for change. Just as I thrive on conversation, the work thrives on conversation with me; I make it, put pictures into it, walk around it, have coffee or read in front of it. I have a picture on my phone of my two little friends from Ahmedabad who came and made their houses on either side of File Museum, with cushions from my sofas, and the middle area became their table; I thought, that’s an interesting concept for two beds. I have to be free to have such conversations around the work.
**
Sometimes, when you meet a new person, it’s like adding a room to your mind. Similarly, walking through a house is sometimes like walking through somebody’s mind. When I wander through your house, it’s very much like walking through your mind, because the things you are influenced by and refer to are all around.**
People tell me, I’ve seen this house before, I’ve seen it in your pictures – but I have never photographed it. So I found a house that looks like my
photographs...

Interview by Stephanie Rosenthal extracted from Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer
Hayward Publishing, London

All reproductions: Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London © The artist 2013