‘I WAS NEVER CONVINCED THAT A PRINT ON A WALL WAS THE ONLY WAY’
With this “range of characters” in her life as her unorthodox guiding spirits, Dayanita struck out on her own – and never looked back. “I am the chairperson of the soloist society of India,” she laughs. “I want to be free. Free of partners, plants, pets. Not that there haven’t been partners. There have – for a while. Only once did it seem like it would turn into marriage but it didn’t. It was painful to break up but it set me free.”
She pauses for a while, then says,
“When people ask me for advice, I say to them, get out of your comfort zone. And a relationship is a comfort zone, isn’t it?” She also believes that in the end we are all alone; she just happened to come to terms with that reality much earlier than most people. When she meets younger artists, she tells them the difference between having ideas and realising those ideas: “In my subjective experience, it has very much to do with a room of one’s own. You need your own space where you can be solitary.”
The freedom that comes with being alone has allowed Dayanita to give her work her full, undivided attention. The result: more than three decades of abundant creativity, of devising new concepts through which people can engage with her work. “I was never convinced that a print on a wall was the only way,” she says.
For instance, the way in which Sent A Letter (2008) came about is a case in point. Dayanita had begun sending friends she travelled with little Moleskine notebooks with contact sheets of photographs taken during their journeys together. She created one for German publisher Gerhard Steidl (of the photographic imprint Steidl) when he visited Kolkata. Gerhard was so taken up with the idea that he published seven of them as small books. They were in accordion folds and could be opened out as a display. “You could have your own little museum at home,” says Dayanita.
Or take the Kochi Box, which Dayanita created at the Kochi Biennale last year. There are 30 cards with pictures of Kerala stacked neatly in a teakwood box: the cards can be shuffled as you please or they can be taken out and displayed. Dayanita made 360 Kochi Boxes and sold them for ₹9,000 each at the Malabar House Hotel. “You could only buy them in Kochi,” she says. “Now they’re sold out. You can’t get them anymore.” Next she will be making a Kyoto Box which will only be on sale in Kyoto. This is a quintessentially Dayanita kind of idea – in a world where you can buy literally anything from anywhere, she dares to be different.
“Sometimes people ask me, why are you doing all this?” she laughs. “You take beautiful pictures. Why can’t you just show them in an exhibition? When I made the Museum of Chance, people told me it was confusing, that there were too many photographs to look at.” But Dayanita wanted that deeper engagement.
The Museum of Chance is very dear to her. Initially, she had decided she would never give it to any museum. “As a joke, I told my gallerist Jane Hamlyn that I’d reconsider only if MoMA wanted it!”
When you’re Dayanita, dreams can come true. By chance.