DAYANITA SINGH: DANCING WITH MY CAMERA is an extensive monograph of the artist Dayanita Singh’s work from her first major retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin. The show runs until August 7, 2022 and the monograph is published by Hatje Cantz.

The exhibition catalogue includes essays by Teju Cole and Stephanie Rosenthal, among others, and a “book timeline” of the artist’s engagement with books as an art form. Trained as a bookmaker, Singh’s photography exists and is presented in a nebulous space between book pages and exhibition walls. In terms of the photographs published, the book travels from works of touching gestures that emphasize a poetic dexterity—hands and limbs dominate the composition and choreography of the photographs—to a more explicit experimentation with the book form as art or artistic structure. This is evident in the work published in the book albeit not as formally by the book itself. Dancing with my Camera foregoes the chronological or linear excepting for the “book timeline” as the only element that may suggest otherwise. Photographs with similar gestures captured echo photographs turned to in the beginning of the book that then become more object-focused images and increasingly abstracted. It is not as if each time period is self-contained in Singh’s practice, as the book demonstrates—much is returned to and porous.