Time Measures

Photography as ready-made: the Time Measures series is a work consisting of 36 photographs, the result of a research project that Dayanita Singh has been developing for several years, that of documenting the traditional methods of archiving documents in government offices in India.

Time Measures does not show us the documents themselves, neither show us the archives, what it presents, through the sequence repetition of size and grey background, is the trace of places and objects. The close-ups on bundles containing -only by suggestion- documents, show us the same red fabric, an anonymous furukoshi style bundle, faded by time. The rhythm and the difference in the photographs are given by the knots of the package’s closures and by the different shades with which the fabric, exposed differently to light or to different storage conditions, loses color and consequently acquires a different image. The archive loses the three-dimension quality, the document is hidden, and the object-bundle work as an image, opening a series of reference and revelation.

Time Measures  is, for Singh, a further step in the research on the photographic image, its distribution, and its fruition: a way of recording passing of time entrusted to rigorous minimal variations, abstract and powerful.

Dayanita Singh, Time Measures, Sequence VII, 2016

now on show in Corpus Domini. From the glorified body to the ruins of the soul, curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti.

Palazzo Reale, Milan
until January 30, 2022

January 21, 2022

© All rights reserved

5 archival pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London