Forget Me Knot

The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh. Both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time; and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can re-visit 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. The documents within these bundles remain as secret and distant to Singh as to us, known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in her images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. "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 re-tied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within. Forget Me Knot invites a process of slow, attentive looking through which the bundles assume the weathered charm of people's faces and bodies; it is her latest expression of the book as a suggestive, self-determined space, both material and imagined.

About the author

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. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; Hayward Gallery, London; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. In 2013 she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. Bookmaking is central to Singh’s practice. Her books with Steidl include Privacy (2004), Chairs (2005), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent a Letter (2007), Dream Villa (2010), File Room (2013), Museum of Chance (2014), Museum Bhavan (2017, Book of the Year at the 2017 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards and winner of the 2018 ICP Infinity Award for Artist’s Book), Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019), Let’s See (2022) and Sea of Files (2022). Singh is the 2022 Hasselblad Award recipient. Her major retrospective “Dancing With My Camera” toured Europe in 2022–24.

Summary

The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh. Both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time; and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can re-visit 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. The documents within these bundles remain as secret and distant to Singh as to us, known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in her images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. “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 re-tied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within. Forget Me Knot invites a process of slow, attentive looking through which the bundles assume the weathered charm of people’s faces and bodies; it is her latest expression of the book as a suggestive, self-determined space, both material and imagined.

Product details

• Authors: Dayanita Singh
• Publisher: Steidl
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.06.2025
• EAN: 9783969994245
• ISBN: 978-3-96999-424-5
• No. of pages: 112
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; Archive, privat, Öffentlich, Archivstücke