A Museum in a Box: Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan
YETA – Your Eyes To Art · Photobooks · about 4 minutes
Who decides how we encounter photographs? Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan hands part of that decision to its readers. The photobook becomes an exhibition space, raising questions about the authority of the museum itself.
A book with several entrances
The first edition of Museum Bhavan, published by Steidl in 2017, brings together nine photographic accordion books and a booklet of conversations, Conversation Chambers, in a box. An accordion book consists of a folded strip of paper: it can be viewed page by page or unfolded and stood upright. Its construction already distinguishes it from a volume primarily read one page after another. [1]
What matters here is less the element of surprise than the question of where art can take place. A tabletop becomes a potential exhibition surface. Someone sitting in front of it need not follow a prescribed route. Distance, proximity and duration are theirs to determine. The small format can ask for a different kind of attention from a large wall: viewers must turn towards an image rather than take it in from across the room.
This does not make the box a substitute for every museum experience. Standing alongside other people before a large print is different from setting up a book alone. Instead, Singh opens another possibility: a photographic work can bring its own exhibition format with it.
Looking also means making decisions
On her own website, Singh describes different ways to present Museum Bhavan. Books can be combined, sections temporarily concealed with clips and arrangements changed again. The instructions treat the work as something readers are allowed to handle and use. [2]
There is a productive tension here. The artist has chosen the material and its form; viewers decide what becomes visible within that framework. They receive neither an entirely open image database nor a fixed installation. Their freedom has a shape. That makes something every exhibition does more apparent: it shows certain things while keeping others outside our field of view for the time being.
Displaying one section today and another tomorrow also changes our memory of the whole. A familiar image can seem strange beside a different neighbour. A detail previously overlooked can become significant. Such shifts need no spectacular staging. They need the possibility of returning.
The book is the work
In her conversation with Lesley A. Martin for Aperture, Singh explains how closely photographs, paper, book structure and exhibition belong together in her practice. Understood this way, the printed book object is an artistic form in its own right. Its purpose extends beyond documenting an original exhibited elsewhere. [3]
This unsettles a familiar hierarchy. If the book is itself the work, its quality cannot be judged solely by how faithfully it reproduces a photographic print. What readers can do with it also matters. The fold, its ability to stand upright and its dimensions become part of the encounter with the photographs. Design here is no disposable wrapping that disappears after the first impression.
Yet the idea remains subject to material conditions: access to the book, space and time. A portable museum is therefore not automatically available to everyone. That limitation deserves attention whenever we talk about opening up art. Smaller dimensions alone do not create accessibility.
What might translate to the screen
For online exhibitions, this suggests an intriguing task. A screen cannot reproduce the feel of paper. It can, however, offer different approaches to a carefully considered selection: a guided route, direct access to individual works and a dependable way back to their context.
Simply letting people shuffle images at will would not necessarily improve the experience. A digital presentation would need to distinguish the artist’s decisions from the choices available to visitors. Information about the works and their context should remain accessible even when someone leaves the suggested route. Freedom works better when orientation is considered alongside it.
Museum Bhavan thus prompts a precise question: how much decision-making can an exhibition give its audience without losing its own position? One possible answer lies in the care with which it frames the encounter. Good curation can establish relationships while leaving room for discovery. An exhibition then need not begin behind a museum door. It begins wherever someone engages attentively with its images.
Sources
- Steidl: Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan
- Dayanita Singh: Museum Bhavan — DIY
- Lesley A. Martin: The Offset Artist, interview with Dayanita Singh, Aperture, January 5, 2018
Sources checked October 10, 2026.
This essay draws on the publisher’s documentation, the artist’s instructions and the published Aperture interview.