ARCHIVIO. Dayanita Singh

For the first time in its history, the Archivio di Stato in Venice will open to the public as an exhibition venue, with Dayanita Singh’s ARCHIVIO. ARCHIVIO is Singh’s tribute to both the Italian archives she has photographed over the past decade and to her own evolving archive of images made in Italy over the last 25 years. Opening to the public on 17 April 2026 at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, in conjunction with the 19th edition of the Incroci di civiltà international literature festival, the exhibition brings together two intertwined bodies of work: Singh’s long engagement with institutional archival repositories and her decades-long visual conversation with Italy’s architecture, interior spaces, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers and more. With a total of over 350 photographs, the exhibition is primarily structured around 15 wooden structures scattered throughout the exhibition space, each capable of holding 20 images. One of the structures is instead located at the main entrance of the Archive and is a gift from the artist to the institution—a testament to Singh’s gratitude for the opportunity to work within this fascinating place that preserves collective memory The exhibition is curated by Andrea Anastasio and, after the Archivio di Stato in Venice, it will travel to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome, to the MAO-Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin, and to the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New Delhi, presenting each time a site-specific works’ selection that connects to site, in collaboration with each Museum and its specificity. 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. ARCHIVIO continues Singh’s ongoing exploration of the museum-as-book and book-as-museum: portable, re-composable architectures for knowledge. The exhibition foregrounds her belief that the archive is not merely a place of preservation, but a generative space – one that shapes the stories we tell and those we have yet to discover. The over 350 photographs on display are divided among the various cities and subjects captured by Singh. Sixty images are dedicated to the Archivio di Stato in Venice and other emblematic locations in the city—Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Iuav University – Project Archives, and the Church of San Sebastiano—as well as the lagoon, the homes of friends and acquaintances, past and recent exhibitions, Murano glass furnaces and archives, and details of artworks. Another sixty feature Rome, whereas forty each capture Florence and Turin, while the selection for Bologna, Naples, and Palermo consists of twenty-four photos per city. To these are added sixty photos taken in various archives in India and a selection of twenty images of patrons and friends who have made her work in Italy possible over the years.”