Dayanita Singh, Mona and Myself  and Sea of Files, installation view the German contribution in the French pavilion Venice 2013, courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. © Roman Mensing in cooperation with Thorsten Arendt, artdoc.de

“As a young woman, Dayanita Singh started to portray a famous Indian musician and tabla player as he traveled around the world. He subsequently became her spiritual mentor, and so traveling has been the form of existence that has shaped Singh’s life and work more profoundly than her roots in her hometown. As though in a dreamlike state, her photographic essays and slide projections fuse innumerable images from her Indian past with her perceptions of the present. European music and literature are influences in her work, as
are the history of (…) movies and the places, structures, and people of her milieu in New Delhi. The melancholy of parting rather than staying constitutes a pervasive undertone in her pictures. Mona is the heart and anchor of Singh’s nomadic life. Probably the one person whom the artist has portrayed more often than anyone else, she stands at the center of a film Singh has developed
for the German contribution at the French Pavilion. Mona is a eunuch, (…) a double outcast rejected first by her family and society and eventually even by the community of eunuchs. Mona now lives in a cemetery in Old Delhi; without a family of her own, she has become Singh’s surrogate family. What does identity mean today to those who do not belong, who are not members of any family or nation?” Susanne Gaensheimer in the foreword of the official publication of the German Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia 2013.

Dayanita Singh, Sea of Files, installation view the German contribution in the French pavilion Venice 2013, courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. © Roman Mensing in cooperation with Thorsten Arendt, artdoc.de