File Room

Dayanita Singh's photos of archives and their custodians across India examine how memory is made and how history
is narrated. These images bring to light the paradox of archives: they are impersonal in their classifications, yet each is
the careful handiwork of an individual archivist, an unsung keeper of history whose decisions generate the sources of
much of our knowledge. Archives are vessels of orthodox fact but can also be the home of neglected details and
forgotten documents than can unfix the status quo. As the pace of change in contemporary India accelerates and Indians
turn from the past and fix their gaze on the future, what will become of the archive? Singh prompts us to imagine archives
as not merely documents of dusty scholarship but as monuments of knowledge, beautiful in their unkempt order.
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. Singh has exhibited at institutions including the Serpentine Gallery in
London and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Handcrafting books is central to her practice. Singh s books at Steidl include
Privacy (2004), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent a Letter (2008) and Dream Villa (2010).