Conversation Chambers: Museum Bhavan

The museums can be opened and closed by the artist to create different shapes, spaces and connections within and among them.

They come with their own boxes, tables, stools and benches. These become part of different kinds of movement, activity and interaction that animate the viewer's experience of the museums.

Here, we enter Museum Bhavan, as installed in KNMA.

On our left is the File Museum

And on our right is the Museum of Little Ladies.

In front of us is the Museum of Photography and behind it, or through it, we can see the Museum of Furniture.

At the other end of the room is the Kochi Pillar on the left

and the Museum of Machines on the right.

Each museum displays images on the outside, sometimes interspersed with framed texts.

It opens up to reveal a reserve collection of images stored inside.

The images on reserve are often kept in boxes that may be taken out of the museum and displayed on the walls of the room in which the museums stand.

The Museum of Little Ladies mingles photographs made by Singh's mother, Nony, of the artist and her siblings at different stages of their childhood with portraits made by the artist herself of various little girls and young women at different stages of their lives.

File Museum collects images of working bureaucratic archives and of the people who maintain the mix of chaos and order in these archives.

File Museum was the first of Singh's museums. Its 140 images become not only an elegy to paper and its decay in time but also a record of the cupboards, tables and chairs, the lights and fans, that hold this forest of matter and data together in an age of inevitable digitization.

But nestling in this timeless labyrinth is an image of a girl on a bed, one of Singh's iconic images, suggesting some secret traffic between the sibling museums.

That girl on the bed assumes multiple forms in the Museum of Little Ladies. Its central panel is a chronological axis, a spine of time, formed by portraits of the artist made by her mother at key moments in her daughter's life.

It recalls themes and characters from other bodies of work by Singh -- Mona Ahmed, for instance, with whom Singh began her career as a maker of photo-book.

In all this structural flux, the Museum of Furniture took another name, at a certain time, and became the Museum of Conversation.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Machines opens up to become less pillar-like, as photography aspires to the conditions of sculpture or architecture, to entice and embrace the human body.

The Museum of Men stands shrouded in white on one side, its images glimmering from behind the unbleached cotton cloth. This is how the museums are veiled when they return to Singh's residence between their travels.

In the Museum of Photography, the women holding their own portraits become images as well as contemplators of their own mortal passage through time.

The Kochi Pillar was unveiled by Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu on 31st January, 2016. It is a distillation of Singh's "1.9.2014 Dear Mr Walter," shown at the Second Kochi Biennale.

On the wall, a row of empty boxes hangs, waiting to be turned into the Office Museum, which is incubating in the Museum of Furniture.

Like pieces of furniture and the machines, the strange objects in the Museum of the Printing Press are both images from a history of the book and a typology of bizarre creatures and forms.

These printing machines stand witness to the importance of Singh's experience of printing her own books with Gerhard Steidl. She often calls herself an offset artist.

Depending on what the viewer brings to this museum, Chance could prove to be a prolific goddess. One viewer was invited by the artist to create an entirely new museum out of the Museum of Chance. He called it the Museum of Erotics, and it hangs on the wall here alongside Chance.

Beginnings and endings come together in this journey of self-engendering museums as Mona Ahmed returns to this particular instance of a museum within a museum, to make longing, loss and the passage of time part of the same ongoing story.