Pothi Khana

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-and Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019). Singh is the 2022 Hasselblad Award recipient.

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.