Archivio di Stato di Venezia - Dayanita Singh - Archivio

"ordering, containing, protecting"

 Archivio di Stato di Venezia  

Dayanita Singh - Archivio

For the first time in its history, the Archivio di Stato in Venice opens to the public as an exhibition venue with Archivio by Dayanita Singh - until July 31 - curated - Andrea Anastasio. Archivio pays tribute to the Italian archives Singh has photographed over the past decade and to her evolving archive of images made in Italy over the last 25 years. The exhibition brings together two interconnected bodies of work: her engagement with institutional archives and her long-running visual exploration of Italy’s architecture, interiors, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers, and more.

In Archivio, the act of photographing becomes a form of cataloguing – an ongoing attempt to understand how memory is shaped, structured, and preserved.

Singh revisits images she has made in Italian cities since the late 1990s, placing them in dialogue with her extensive studies of archives in India and elsewhere. Through this encounter, the exhibition proposes the archive not as a static storehouse but as a living organism, continuously rearranged through the artist’s editorial play, display structures, and resequencing of images.

Curator Andrea Anastasio situates Singh’s practice within the broader question of how we construct cultural memory. The installation reflects his interest in the poetic and philosophical resonance of archival labour – ordering, containing, protecting – while allowing Singh’s photographs to remain open and porous, shifting with each new context.

More than 350 photographs are organized by city and subject. Sixty images focus on Venice, including the Archivio di Stato and other lagoon locations, while the rest explore Rome, Florence, Turin, Bologna, Naples, Palermo, as well as Indian archives, and the homes of friends and acquaintances, past and recent exhibitions.

Dayanita Singh - Archivio

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