Pothi Khana

The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh. Both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time; and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can re-visit and display at will. In Pothi Khana (Hindi for “archive room”), Singh presents photographs of India’s seemingly endless private and public archives: shelf after shelf of bundles wrapped and knotted in pieces of cloth once colorful but now almost white with age. The documents within these bundles remain as secret and distant to Singh as to us, known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in her images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. Originally exhibited in 2018 at the 57th Carnegie International as a group of modular, pillar-like wooden structures whose photographs could be endlessly re-sequenced, Singh now transforms the mobile sensibility of Pothi Khana into a volume which she sees as a compendium to File Room, published by Steidl in 2013, and her latest expression of the book as a suggestive, self-determined space, both material and imagined.