Description

Two photographic series documenting the material wear and tear of India's archival bundles

The archive has long been an obsession for Indian photographer Dayanita Singh (born 1961)--both literal archives and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can revisit and display at will. Forget Me Knot combines two series exploring the intriguing cloth bundles of India's archives. In Pothi Khana (Hindi for "archive room"), Singh presents black-and-white 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. Time Measures marks the first time Singh has made portraits of the archive bundles, photographing them individually and close up against a neutral stone background. Their details are thus revealed: the unique sun-bleached red patterns, the varying shapes and knots (tied and retied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within.