Resisting Melancholy: Filing the Real in Dayanita Singh’s File Room
by Shankar Tripathi Supported by Murthy NAYAK Foundation/ PhotoSouthAsia
First published by Critical Collective, 2022.
It is hard to deny the arresting punctum of File Room’s towering compositions. Monumental, and yet contained within the frames of Dayanita Singh’s razor-sharp photography, these stacks of files and documents highlight the withering vestiges of our stately, bureaucratic past-a past that is now slowly being accessioned into the virtual sphere from the physically archived. Quite literally then, these photographs present themselves as “an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge” [1], documenting a fitting farewell to a remnant of a time past.
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