Dayanita Singh: Pothi Khana

A photobook archive of archives, from rarely seen collections throughout India

The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh (born 1961)–both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time, and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can revisit 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 known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in Singh’s 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, pillarlike wooden structures whose photographs could be endlessly resequenced, Singh now transforms the mobile sensibility of Pothi Khana into this volume, which she sees as a compendium to 2013’s File Room.