Dayanita Singh, according to her website, “uses photography to reflect and expand on how we relate to images”; most recently, she has been exploring photographic relations through her new exhibition ARCHIVIO at the State Archives in Venice. Her work with ARCHIVIO is funded through patrons and without major corporate funding. The exhibit runs from April 17, 2026, to July 31, 2026.
Dayanita Singh shared with Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic that she had given herself “the challenge of achieving all this without major corporate or commercial gallery funding,” and that Singh “bartered and negotiated” to get into Italian archives spanning from Naples to Venice. Galleries and museums usually rely on corporate sponsorship, particularly as public funding and attendance wane, according to Vivienne Chow of artnet. Singh and ARCHIVIO display the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, through Singh's photographic innovation.
This is the first time the State Archives (Archivio di Stato) will be used as an exhibition venue. ARCHIVIO provides a collaboration between two of Singh’s bodies of work: her engagement with institutional archives and her long photographic interest in Italy’s architecture, interior spaces, artworks, etc. There are over 350 photographs on display in the exhibit, and 15 wooden structures around the space, meant to provide structure to the flow of photographs.
The visual display is constructed in a way that embraces the space as one containing archival work, rather than trying to mask and re-invent it around Singh’s photographs. Shelves holding white binders of archived material already present in the State Archives act as a background to the wooden pillars around the room, and share shelf space with Singh’s photographs of Indian archival documents wrapped in red cloth.
Singh’s work is quite expansive: mostly the work of gathering photographs and “sequenc[ing]” them, according to her website. A large part of her work, now, comes out in the form of published books, often published without text. It was her humanist approach to photography, creating a new path forward for images, which won Singh the Hasselblad Award in 2022. Previous award recipients include Nan Goldin, Graciela Iturbide and Cindy Sherman. Singh was the first South Asian artist to receive the Hasselblad.
For her new exhibit, she was able to further explore her love of sifting through and laying bare archival work. ARCHIVIO brings about an alternate funding structure that rejects the ever-growing reliance of arts spaces on corporate money. Dayanita Singh and curator Andrea Anastasio do more than display Singh’s photography: they celebrate her earned creative autonomy.