Time measures

Time Measures is a series of 34 colour photographs that result from artist Dayanita Singh’s longstanding interest in paper archives. These photographs depict bundles wrapped in a faded red fabric, each hand-tied in a unique manner. 

These bundles contain documents located in Indian archives, and the photographs offer us a unique portrait of their indeterminate content. This photographic series is atypical of Dayanita Singh’s work for its rare use of colour, and it creates an abstract landscape in which each image becomes a meditation on the passage of time and our human presence through the simple gestures of tying and enveloping. The work’s title takes its inspiration from a poem by German writer W. G. Sebald that underscores the intrinsic nature of time passing.

The Pinault Collection showed this work for the first at the Icones exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2023