Museum of Shedding is basically a room of simple, quiet meditative photos. In the centre of the space, there’s an empty display cabinet, a bench and a table marked ‘director’. The idea is to imagine yourself as the head of a fictional museum, trying to figure out how to display the images here. Singh is letting you come up with a narrative for her images, allowing you to curate meaning into whatever’s around you. It’s a chance to let your imagination get to work on the art.
The black and white photos are of empty buildings, rooms filled with massive rocks, empty jugs, and a shirt pierced with bullet holes. There’s something going on with empty vessels here, a story being told about spaces wanting to be filled with something, or natural objects being removed from their environments. Are we meant to see these as spaces waiting for meaning? Targets for our curatorial smarts in our role as director?
The series of colour photos are more obvious. They show books bound in red cloth. It’s hard not to see them as bloody rags, knotted mementos of pain. But there’s a lot hidden here, a lot to uncover.
There’s a lot of potential in this exhibition, the chance to create your own threads of meaning. It’s fascinating and absorbing if you can concentrate on it, but the endless questions of the show end up needing some kind of answer, otherwise it leaves you feeling a little unsatisfied.