Living organisms

The Venice State Archives opens to the public as an exhibition venue with ARCHIVIO, a tribute to photographer Dayanita Singh. Curated by Andrea Anastasio, the show intertwines two core strands of Singh’s practice: her long engagement with institutional archives and her decades long visual dialogue with architecture, interiors, artworks, archivists, friends and everyday objects. For Singh, photographing is an act of cataloguing, a way to understand how memory is shaped and preserved. The exhibition brings together images taken in Italian cities since the late 1990s and her studies of archives in India and beyond, presenting the archive as a living organism continually reordered through sequencing, display structures and editorial work. Singh sees the archive as a generative space that shapes cultural memory and future narratives. The exhibition is a major highlight within the program of Incroci di Civiltà, the International Literature Festival of the Ca’ Foscari University, and is accompanied by a public program of talks, conferences and book presentations, as well as a mentoring initiative for university students in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari and IUAV.

Featured image: From Venice Pillar 3 © Dayanita Singh/Archivio | From Venice Pillar 2 © Dayanita Singh/Archivio