Time Measures

Dayanita Singh has long photographed the intriguing cloth bundles of India’s archives, yet Time Measures marks the first time she has made portraits of them. Unlike its sister book Pothi Khana, which shows such bundles within their environments (on overflowing shelves, in the practiced hands of archivists), Time Measures presents these treasures photographed individually and close-up against a neutral stone background. Their details are thus revealed: the unique sun-bleached patterns in red, green or blue, the varying shapes and knots (tied and re-tied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within (which remain unknown even to Singh herself). Her images invite a process of slow, attentive looking through which the bundles assume the weathered charm of people’s faces; the series becomes a shifting taxonomy of portraits. Bound in three different covers and designed to be hung directly on the wall, Time Measures furthermore extends Singh’s project of transforming the book into the exhibition.