Böcker av Dayanita Singh

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.

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 custodi- ans 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.

This book is Dayanita Singh's meditative, sometimes melancholic exploration of a range of work environments across India. It comprises three visual chapters, each springing from individual, larger series in Singh's archive which she has now re-edited around the theme of work. The first, "Museum of Machines," presents black-and-white images of factory equipment, stately despite its grime, and only occasionally joined by human counterparts. "Blue Book" shows photographs of industrial landscapes Singh made on her wandering-exceptionally in color, the serendipitous outcome of running out of black-and-white film. All are tinged with the same eerie hue and form a poetic critique of the sites of labor. "Go Away Closer" returns us to black and white, and reveals the greatest range of subjects, from thousands of scooters in a warehouse to the charming clutter of a shop, and are taken from a series Singh originally edited according to what she calls the "note and feeling" of the images. Together, the chapters are furthermore a blueprint for the work involved in Singh's own bookmaking: the unceasing reassessment of her archive and its rebirth in book form.

The internationally acclaimed artist Dayanita Singh often describes herself as a "book artist." Singh was closely involved in the making of this exhibition catalogue, which accompanies the major touring retrospective of Singh's work, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal for the Gropius-Bau. The most comprehensive publication to date about Singh's art, it includes a series of scholarly long-form and short-form essays, full-color reproductions, and installation images. The texts situate Singh's work in relation to topics such as Indian classical music, traditions of the photographic, imaginations of the archive, choreography and economies of reproduction. Presenting every important phase in the artist's oeuvre, it also enters Singh's archive to include never-before-seen early works from the 1980s, a new series of montages and the works Let's see, Museum of Chance, Museum of Shedding, I am as I am, Go Away Closer and Box 507, among others.DAYANITA SINGH (*1961) is one of the most important contemporary artists. Solo exhibitions include: MMK, Frankfurt; Hayward Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2013, Singh contributed to the German Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.

Is it a book, an exhibition, a catalogue of the exhibition? Is it mass produced? Is it unique? Dayanita Singh is a book artist who stretches the imagination of what a book can be, transcending the spaces between publishing and art. Book Building traces the journeys of Singh's books, from the first, Zakir Hussain (1986), to her latest, Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019), showing the spectrum of her book-building process, from idea to material object and how she inventively circulates them in the art world and beyond.Both a short history and a deep dive, this is Dayanita Singh's manifesto for the photobook. Taking those she has made with Steidl as a basis, we witness the transformation of books into book-objects which open up new interpretative spaces: Museum of Chance (2014), for example, first became a book-object, then a diptych, a book-case, a suitcase museum and a book museum, before finally becoming the ongoing museum in Singh's Museum Bhavan (2017). Book Building documents Singh's 13 books in images and short texts, along with several DIYs Singh has created with detailed instructions on how to display her books as exhibitions-making us the curators-as well as various performative interventions, from book carts and happenings, to installations and tours. At the heart of Book Building is the collaborative process that Dayanita Singh and Gerhard Steidl have established over 20 years; the belief that a book is always in a process of becoming.

"I wanted to suggest a conversation among these chairs, which have always seemed to me more like people than objects, with distinct personalities and genders even." With this sentiment in mind, Dayanita Singh went about photographing the many chairs living throughout the houses and public buildings designed by Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003), whom Singh deems a "tropical modernist" and the most influential architect of the South Asian region. Less still lifes than portraits, Singh's images show how Bawa's spaces engage with the chairs, be they designed or collected by Bawa, or installed after his passing. Made to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Bawa's birth, Bawa Chairs is constructed as an accordion-fold booklet in the manner of Singh's Chairs (2005), Sent a Letter (2007) and Museum Bhavan (2017), and intended to be unfolded and installed at will-transforming the book into an exhibition, and the reader into a curator.