Dayanita Singh

In order to understand how deeply, yet elusively, cinema informs the whole of Dayanita Singh’s work—in the artist’s twinned focus on book making and museum building—one might begin and end with her friend and lifelong subject, the late Mona Ahmed. To her singing and dancing, to the living out of her loves and losses, to her rueful wisdom, and finally to her decline and death, Mona brought the artifice and amplitude of a great and ongoing cinematic performance. Like most other members of her community of , a Hindi term for people of a third gender that is neither male nor female, she began adult life performing at births and marriages in respectable Indian homes. But she went on to estrange herself from her kind, dying in a home in a ruined graveyard in Old Delhi that she managed to keep in a state of perpetual construction as long as she