Overview

'At the heart of a working archive was a greater impossibility— a dogged but doomed attempt at mapping the chaos and brittleness of life itself.' - Aveek Sen This is the long-awaited new edition of Dayanita Singh’s File Room, her first book dedicated to the archive, and published by Steidl in 2013. Singh’s images of archives and their custodians across India examine how memory is made and how history is narrated. Her photographs bring to light the paradoxes of archives: while impersonal in their classifications, each is the careful handwork of an individual archivist, an unsung keeper of history whose decisions generate the sources of much of our knowledge. Archives are vessels of orthodox facts but also the home of neglected details and forgotten documents that can unsettle the status quo. As the pace of contemporary India accelerates and its people continue to turn from the past and fix their gaze on the future, what will become of the archive? Singh prompts us to imagine archives not merely as documents of dusty scholarship but as monuments of knowledge, beautiful in their unkempt order.

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9783969991848

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Dayanita Singh was born in New Delhi in 1961 and studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; Hayward Gallery, London; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. In 2013 she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. Bookmaking is central to Singh’s practice. Her books with Steidl include Privacy (2004), Chairs (2005), Go Away Closer(2007), Sent a Letter (2007), Dream Villa (2010), File Room (2013), Museum of Chance (2014), Museum Bhavan (2017, Book of the Year at the 2017 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and winner of the 2018 ICP Infinity Award for Artist’s Book), Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019), Let’s See (2022) and Sea of Files (2022). Singh is the 2022 Hasselblad Award recipient.

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