A portable museum has established itself at Frith Street Gallery. Its empty desk waits for a registrar, curator or director depending on which panel the wooden prism signage block placed in its center, reveals. Beyond this desk, there is a low bedstead framed by an elegant screen, a series of wooden stools dispersed across the gallery’s concrete floor, and two storage units holding part of the museum’s collection of black and white “photo-architecture” images. This domestic arrangement by Dayanita Singh, entitled Museum of Shedding (2016), can quickly pack away, and similar to structures in her “Museum” series (2012– ), the wooden infrastructure can be reconfigured. It can open out, it can be folded inwards, and this museum’s collection of photographs can be re-sequenced and edited.

Knowing that the spatial dimensions of the museum and the collection have a potential dynamism, and may rotate over the show’s duration makes the curator-registrar-director’s absence intriguing. The emptiness gives the museum a peculiar personality. It at once has a faceless agency, which the viewer can appreciate. There are photographs and a series of empty storage frames, displayed in a grid formation along two interfacing walls, which the museum has chosen to show. Others are kept in the two storage units positioned close by. The museum also seeks our involvement and interaction. The images are notably placeless; a mix of contemporary and historic architectural details including marble walls, geological masses with repetitive black and white textural contours, desolate corridors and unoccupied chairs. Combined with three empty wooden frames that hang on the wall, the museum compels the viewer to make connections, and consider how the shifting elements of the work impact the meaning. As the artist has suggested in previous interviews, the arrangement of the photographs is rhythmic, a process similar to editing music as she reflects upon pitch and musical tones while working. This helps make the work meditative, and the pace set by the display of objects certainly provides an opportunity to explore the complexities of exhibition design and its transmutable relationship with archives and collections.