The title of Indian photographer Dayanita Singh's new work, 'File Museum', sounds distinctly dusty. The kind of bureaucratic paperwork she is referring to seems especially anachronistic in relation to the terrifyingly featherweight, digitalised world to which we are accustomed, a world where paper has been replaced by PDFs and other such e-matter. Comprising 140 framed black-and-white prints and a teak cabinet-cum-display case that both holds and exhibits the photographs, Singh's work betrays an archaic appetite for the archival accumulation of print.
The artist's portraits and documentary-style photographs detail civic archives in municipal offices, courts and libraries across India. Her curious shots picture row upon row of laden shelving, heavy with stacks of unidentifiable files, towers of bulging sacks stuffed with papers, and office spaces in which the archivists busy themselves with endless screeds of records.
An artist who has frequently dipped into publishing and bookmaking, Singh is furthering her ongoing exploration into the ways that photographs can be shown and viewed. 'File Museum' has been configured in such a way that the framed prints may be frequently rearranged, with some exhibited on the structure itself and others hung on the wall. It would seem, however, that the gallery envisages no such rejigging, because on the wall hang portraits of the workers and in the cabinet sit portraits of the papers. While the idea of a collection of prints – all slotted into their own beautiful wooden boxes – that itself documents innumerable archives is undeniably poetic, the installation of this elegiac work remains stiff.