The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Photography itself is very limiting, it’s just like knowing a language, [yet] it’s what you do with it that will make you a writer or a poet . . . For me, the alphabet, and forming a few words, is not enough. I want to do more, to push the limits, to make fiction from seemingly ‘real’ images. 1 DAYANITA SINGH Dayanita Singh describes herself as a ‘bookmaker working with photography’. 2 She has published ten books since 1986, six of them with the German publisher Gerhard Steidl. Mostly, they can be described as photo-books, or ‘photo-fictions’ as Singh has called them. Characteristically, they are small enough to carry in a handbag or satchel; they are inexpensive, free from lengthy texts and the photographs are often printed at a uniform size. Since the late 1990s, Singh has also exhibited her photographs, presenting the framed prints in uniform grids and increasingly large agglomerations. Through the process of selection and regrouping of images, Singh seeks to create something new, the pictorial equivalent of poetry or music. For her APT7 installation entitled Fiction in the Archive 2012, Singh has mined her extensive personal photographic archive to select 36 photographs, some of which are hung in a dense cluster on one wall of the Gallery. For the first-time viewer of Singh’s work, there is no clear connection between these diverse images — most are black and white, but a few are tinged with blue. Some include people, but many show empty rooms. Reviewing the artist’s ‘back catalogue’, photographs can be identified from different contexts, such as one of Zakir Hussain, the master tabla player and eponymous subject of Singh’s first publication in 1986. Another shows Mona Ahmed, the hijra or eunuch with whom Singh collaborated on her 2001 publication Myself Mona Ahmed . Photographs showing Jawaharlal Nehru’s clothes and Rabindranath Tagore’s bed were taken during projects when Singh documented the house–museums dedicated to these great figures in India’s history and culture. Here, in this partial and temporary articulation, these individual images are cut loose from these original contexts, becoming fragments of the artist’s personal ‘picture atlas’ 3 . Fiction in the Archive features a number of images included in Singh’s installation ‘File Room’ at the 2011 Venice Biennale, which show numerous rooms filled with documents either piled on shelves or gathered in cloth sacks. The impression they give of chaotic disorder belies an organisational logic that is nonetheless discernible, like a secret rhythm or code, to those who inhabit such spaces. Although they seem anachronistic, even Kafkaesque — like some excessive remainder of the British-imposed Civil Service — these paper archives are fully functioning. In another series, ‘File Keepers’, Singh focuses on the individuals who manage these various governmental archives and who are the human elements that keep them in order. These are the necessary, irreplaceable but under-recognised keepers of increasingly esoteric knowledge. Singh’s fictions are not easily interpreted or explained. Rather, a project such as Fiction in the Archive creates a mood — most often one of pensive melancholy. One subgroup of images features industrial sites — factories, silos, furnaces and warehouses, as well as some starkly functional interior spaces. These are among the first photographs Singh took consistently using colour film, published in Blue Book (2009); the blue cast comes from using daylight film in low light conditions. The colour blue seems apposite for Singh’s project, although its inference of melancholy should not be interpreted as lamenting the analogue photograph’s obsolescence in an increasingly digitised world. Singh’s art is not self-referentially about photography as a medium. In fact, she seeks to leave the idea of ‘photography’ behind, and not simply to add to the tsunami of images that has engulfed the world since the advent of the camera phone. A sense of absence or loss emanates from projects such as Fiction in the Archive , which is poetic rather than pragmatic (Singh once noted that Michael Ondaatje’s poem ‘What we lost’ sums up in 20 lines what she has been trying to create for the last 20 years 4 ). It is imprecise, indescribable and unfixable, but nevertheless tangible. The empty corridors, the unoccupied windows of a watch tower, a disintegrating bed frame within an abandoned room, all speak of an absent occupant, something or someone outside the frame occupying a different space and time. These images are mediated — orchestrated, even — by a consciousness that is the artist’s own. It is Singh who elects the affinities that might result from her marriage of images, providing her project with its symbolic, even spiritual (or memorial) significance. Fiction in the Archive forms part of this project, which is the archive of her life’s work as an artist, as well as a partial archive of India. It is necessarily unfinished, and constantly evolves with each exhibition or publication. Miranda Wallace 1 Cited in Janice Pariat, ‘A Novel Short Story’, Open , 15 December 2011. 2 See the artist’s website, <http://www.dayanitasingh.com/about> , viewed 2 October 2012. 3 The reference is to Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne , or ‘picture atlas’, dedicated to the classical goddess of memory, which the art historian created in the last years of his life, c.1928–29. These 79 ‘pin- boards’ featured a range of disparate images (Renaissance paintings, newspaper photographs etc.), reflecting Warburg’s esoteric interests and historical investigations through purely visual juxtapositions. 4 Singh, cited in Carlos Gollonet and Carlos Martin Garcia, Dayanita Singh , Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid, 2009, p.16. Ondaatje’s poem can be found in Granta , no.57, Spring 1997. DAYANITA SINGH Fictions unbound 202