FILE ROOM
Artist: Dayanita Singh
Year: 2013
Description: "File Room is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. The analogue photographer and bookmaker has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people."
Significance: Dayanita Singh's photographs of papers printed on beautiful matte paper and bound in a book is a cyclical celebration, as is much of her work including Museum Bhavan which repackages museums into concertina books or miniature museums which were subsequently exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Her work is proof that the vessel of a photograph can exponentially increase its impact. Steidl describes the importance of her work"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."
