Dayanita Singh

Limited edition Mona, Mother, Mohun and the FILEROOM, 2016 by Dayanita Singh.

Dayanita Singh created Mona, Mother, Mohun and the FILEROOM, 2016 to celebrate and support the opening of the Blavatnik building at Tate Modern in 2016. The edition of 100 uses two File Room books, each with an archival print pasted onto the hardback cover. The book covers come in a variety of colours and it is intended by the artist that the cover colour in each work is a surprise. Each book is presented in a bespoke wooden frame with hinges that allow for it to be opened and closed and presented on a shelf. Each edition is accompanied by a signed and numbered certificate.

FILEROOM is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. It documents, and reflects on, the nature of paper as material and symbol in the work of making photographs and books. It includes an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that relates this book object with Singh’s other books and bodies of work, and texts by Aveek Sen that explore the different ways in which the mad world of files and paperwork continue to touch ordinary lives, File Room is itself an archive of archives

Prices of the artwork are liable to change. As a limited edition sells out, prices of the artwork are subject to increase and the price will be clearly indicated.

About the Artist

Dayanita Singh’s (b. 1961, New Delhi) works in analogue photography and bookmaking. She has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people. Publishing is a significant part of the artist’s practice: in her books, she experiments with alternate forms of producing and viewing photographs. Here, Singh’s latest is the “book-object,” a work that is concurrently a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue. This work, also developing from the artist’s interest in the poetic and narrative possibility of sequence and re-sequence, allows Singh to both create photographic sequence and also simultaneously disrupt it.

Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square, London, the Hayward Gallery, London), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Singh has authored twelve books.

• Artist Dayanita Singh
• Artwork Mona, Mother, Mohun and the FILEROOM
• Dimensions 35 X 27 X 6 cm (closed)
• Material Fileroom books, wooden frame, archival prints
• Edition Edition of 100, signed and numbered
• Date of work 2016