In 1999, a chance trip led Singh to Saligao, a small village in Goa, where she began to make portraits of local families. Often taken just after the subjects returned from church, the images in the series expanded to include not just the families but also their homes.
A year later, Singh exhibited 40 of these portraits at the Saligao Institute, the village’s local community centre. Titled ‘Demello Vado’, the show consisted of large, 20 x 24 inch black-and-white prints that Singh laminated and stuck to the wall with double-sided tape. The exhibition ran for a total of 3 weeks and was launched with a grand opening party. Many guests wore the same clothes they wore in their portraits and everyone danced the mando to a live band.
It was at this event that Singh was introduced to her future house, which was, by some uncanny coincidence, located in Demello Vado. Strange that the name of her exhibition became her address in Goa. Later, Singh would experience a curious moment of “reverse déjà vu” when she discovered that the inside of the house looked exactly like a photograph of her empty spaces.
At the end of the 3 weeks, Singh invited everyone to peel their photos off the wall and take them back to their respective homes, where many of the portraits still hang today.
This was an instrumental moment for Singh because it gave her a way to make her work accessible outside of existing institutional frameworks. “I realized that my exhibition prints would hang in the homes of the very people I photographed,” she says. “Which I knew was an honour for my work, since I would be part of someone’s family archive.”
But she had also found her own parallel route for dissemination, bypassing institutional frameworks, be they a museum, a gallery, a magazine or even a book. “So, in that way, Demello Vado is my most seminal exhibition. I learned I could take charge of my work and I did not have to depend on anyone else.”
Singh had always wanted her works to be alive in people’s homes and this exhibition had shown her this was possible. This method of offering her prints formally began the idea of the gift in her artistic practice.