The State Archives of Venice will allow its premises — a 13th-century monastery building — to be used as an exhibition venue for the first time, and that too for an Indian photographer.
The Italian Cultural Centre in New Delhi said the exhibition titled Archivio will feature the works of Dayanita Singh.
“For the first time in its history, the Archivio di Stato in Venice will open to the public as an exhibition venue, with Dayanita Singh’s Archivio… tribute to both the Italian archives she has photographed over the past decade and to her own evolving archive of images made in Italy over the last 25 years. Opening on April 16, 2026, at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, the exhibition brings together two intertwined bodies of work: Singh’s long engagement with institutional archival repositories and her decades-long visual conversation with Italy’s architecture, interior spaces, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers and more,” the centre said in a statement.
The exhibition is curated by design anthropologist Andrea Anastasio. After Venice, it will travel to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome, then to the MAO-Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin, and finally to the Italian Cultural Centre in Delhi.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a public programme of lectures and book presentations. Singh will also organise a mentorship programme for university students in collaboration with Iuav university on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its foundation, and with the departments of philosophy and cultural heritage and human studies at Ca’ Foscari university in Venice.
The permission for an exhibition in these hallowed archives — that have documents of the Republic of Venice dating back to more than 1,000 years — and that too for an Indian photographer comes as a gust to the sails on India’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale next month.
India’s pavilion will make a comeback at the event after six years.