GLOSSARY

An alaap is the first instantiation of the notes of a raga. It is a gradual exposition of a raga’s musical form, and an invocation of its mood. Alaap establishes the basic structure of a raga, after which a rhythmic cycle kicks in and the raga proceeds into a lyrical composition. Singh finds in alaap a technique by which to introduce the key elements of her work and set up the boundaries within which it will unfold. Singh’s alaaps—such as the ‘overture’ in House of Love , or the sequence of images that often precede the Contents page of her books—are then not only invitations into the particular tempo of her work, but also guidelines by which it might be received.

A repository of documents that provides information about a place, institution or group of people Singh shows us that an archive is not only a repository of data but also a critical mass of triggers that exists as a form in itself. An archive demands to be inhabited, to be constantly organised and rearranged. It is through this inhabitation that the archive reveals its clues—a secret set of connections lying latent, waiting to be recognised and brought into being. The labour of the archivist is then not simply the maintenance of a pre-existing archive but the act of mining the archive to find the clues embedded in it. It is up to the archivist to invent the mode of practice that builds and nourishes the archive, and to continually devise techniques by which to gather, catalogue and edit its contents. In this way, the archivist may evoke new forms within the archive. From Indian classical music, Singh learns that an archive might also rest within one’s ordinary routines, activities and relationships. In the absence of a pre-written composition, a raga’s performance comes to rely on the archive of everyday life and the moods and affects that one accumulates within it. The specific improvisatory routes taken by an Indian classical musician draw from these everyday experiences, and the forms of inner life that they build. The conceptions of archive in both Singh’s work and in Indian classical music demonstrate the lived relationality by which ordinary experience comes to be prepared and rendered as art. Together, these conceptions show us how to live and work in the companionship of time, and alongside the various shapes that time takes when it is ordered and reinhabited. “The archive is my community.” — Singh (2021)

Singh finds that her editing process often begins with the identification of an addressee, who goes on to offer a tone in which to order and sequence her work. Such an addressee might be living or dead, fictional or non-fictional, secret or explicit. As in the case of Sent a Letter , this addressee may be the intended recipient of the work or, as in Zakir Hussain , the person around whom the work centres. The figure of the addressee, in Singh’s practice, is therefore both a conduit of form and a technique by which to lend focus to her process. Indian classical music is ordered in terms of a time theory in accordance with which every raga is addressed to a particular season or time of day. The addressee of Raga Poorvi, for instance, is the sunset, and the addressee of Raga Malhar is the monsoon. Indian classical musicians might address their performances to their gurus and their riyaaz to themselves.

Accidental; unforeseeable; possibility, probability; happened upon; fate; luck; gamble; risk A sacred geometry of events or occurrences that present themselves seemingly casually, but begin to reveal their true potency when one learns to be led by them. Chance is the animating principle of Singh’s work. In her family of travelling museums, the Museum of Chance is the Mother Museum . When the museums began to spontaneously give birth to new museums, Singh learnt that while Chance could never be created, it was perhaps possible to build the circumstances that invite Chance to pass through.

Chilla refers to a period of forty days during which apprentices of Indian classical music isolate themselves from their regular routines and relationships to focus their physical and emotional energy on music. During this period, the apprentice is locked into a room, called the chilla khana or chilla kamra. Even meals are slid in from beneath the door. Singh described the months she spent isolated in her apartment during the pandemic as her opportunity for chilla. She dedicated this time to a rigorous examination of her form, and to disappearing into “the forest of her archive”.

A talk between two or more people in which thoughts, feelings, and ideas are expressed, questions are asked and answered, or news and information is exchanged Singh’s work shows us that one might have a conversation with a text, a person, perhaps even a building. For Singh, a conversation is foremost a rhythm in which to sense, exchange and receive thought. At the same time, she finds that conversations themselves come to be structured by the architectures within which they are held. Conversations in Singh’s work tend to become ongoing, lasting sometimes for decades. Singh notices that more often than not, the truest conversation lies not in the content of what is spoken, but in a parallel formation of thought that it triggers. This ‘third thing’ in a conversation, evoked crucially by an attunement between its speakers, might be located musically within the concept of jugalbandi. In Indian classical music, a jugalbandi is performed when a pair of musicians confronts and complements one another in a joint effort to build a raga. Much like jugalbandi—which translates literally to ‘entwined twins’—Singh’s conception of conversation acknowledges the relationality and mutual accountability on which thought relies, as well as the worlds that come into being in the encounters between our selves and others’. Singh titled her 2016 exhibition Conversation Chambers . Her 2022 retrospective will be called Ongoing Conversations.

Singh believes that the dissemination of the image is as crucial to photography as the image itself. She encourages photographers to invest not only in the making of images, but equally in the building of forms that facilitate their circulation. While a student at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Singh chose to spend her winters travelling across India by bus with some of the country’s finest musicians. The objective of these tours was to take Indian classical music, a form usually limited to urban upper-class, upper-caste concert halls, to small towns that wouldn’t ordinarily have access to it. During the course of her travels, Singh gained a sense not only of the modes of initiative that propel the everyday life of an art form but also the careful logistical calculations that enable it. The internal architecture of the ‘musician’s bus’, and the routes that it designed and traversed seem now a model for the ways in which Singh’s work moves between the various nodes of its reception— museums, book fairs, kerbside vitrines and, perhaps most importantly, people’s homes. The spirit of dissemination that mobilises Singh’s work is clearly embodied in her Suitcase Museums, as well as in the book-carts from which she personally made offerings of her book-objects. Within their circuits of dissemination, Singh’s work pairs notions of high art with democratic aspiration, and challenges the conventional hierarchies of the art market.

Adjustment for distinct vision : state or condition permitting clear perception or understanding One of the most valuable lessons Singh learnt from her mentor Ustad Zakir Hussain was the idea of single-minded focus, the exclusion of all else. Zakir Hussain helped Singh understand that one had to first master one’s medium before making the attempt to challenge it. In order to achieve this mastery, focus was key. Singh often says that she is a student of the ‘Zakir Hussain School of Focus’. “It’s all about where you decide to focus and how you measure the light. In photography and in life too.” —Singh (2020)

Singh speaks of the grant she received in 1997 from photographer Robert Frank as a true gift. Frank’s grant was a declaration of faith in Singh that came without the burden of indebtedness. In many ways, Singh’s work has relied on this capacity of the gift to free gestures of exchange from the binding temporalities of transaction. Much like the figure of the addressee, Singh builds the gift into her technique. She argues that some of her best work has been born out of an impulse to gift. The immediacy of its impetus and the privacy of its affective logic separate a gift from the formal expectations of galleries, and allow Singh to be liberated even from her own trajectory of work. Singh’s gifts engender their own forms of reciprocity: they often come with the potential to be re-gifted, as in the case of the Zakir Hussain Maquette , which splits itself into three different works, each of which can be passed on as a furthering of Singh’s original gift. At times, Singh’s work also comes encased in a secret gift—along with the Kochi Box , for instance, one also receives the opportunity to become its curator. Within communities of Indian classical musicians, a natural talent for music is sometimes conceived of as a gift. And yet, simply being a gifted musician is not enough. One must also shape one’s routines and values such that they are deserving of this gift. Much like in Singh’s work, the affective force and the rhythms of investment latent in a gift come to be harnessed within Indian classical music towards a furthering of one’s form.

Gu: darkness. Ru: light Guru refers to the movement from darkness to light, manifest in the person who leads you to your own riyaaz.

An activated piece of text that allows you to connect or move between two sites on the internet Singh often refers to photographs as hyperlinks. By doing so, she indicates the forms of live potential that a photograph contains, its ability to evoke new affective encounters and forge new connections across the form. At the same time, Singh’s use of the term hyperlink also gestures towards the dormancy of a single image, which exists as a dead link unless embedded within a form that animates it. Perhaps most significantly, however, Singh’s conception of a photograph as a hyperlink invites and demands the labour of activation necessary to bring it into being. The notes of a raga may also be thought of as hyperlinks. The greatest of Indian classical musicians are able to convey the mood of a raga using just two notes. When backed by sufficient riyaaz, these notes have the capacity to evoke webs of intense affect. The same notes might also, however, be experienced as being empty or dead, despite being rendered perfectly tunefully. Singh would argue that the impotence of these notes was a result of a lack not only of an integrity of form but also of an audience’s labour of aesthetic experience. Both Singh’s work and Indian classical music then seem imbued with a potential energy that relies on being activated by those that receive it. Singh often speaks of how the musician Kishori Amonkar, whom she visited and photographed, “carried an ocean in her voice”. Every note that Amonkar uttered seemed to resonate with and draw from this ocean’s vastness and depth.

In Indian classical music, the term ‘khaali’ refers to the blank or silent beat embedded within a rhythmic cycle, or taal. Most rhythmic cycles have one or more khaalis. Indicated by a wave of the hand, the khaali functions as the moment of withholding that draws a cycle to its completion. The potency of the khaali lies in the absence it embodies, in the anticipation it generates. By doing so it manages to hold together ideas of departure and arrival, longing and fulfilment, distance and closure, all within a perfectly timed gesture of restraint. One might think of the empty space of the khaali as a moment of inhalation or oxygenation that brings a rhythmic cycle to life. Singh describes the ‘empty spaces’ in her work as khaalis. The relation she draws is two-fold. On the one hand, she finds in khaali a mechanism by which to shape repetition into rhythm—she relies crucially in this regard on the empty pages in her books to lend texture and shape to the narratives she builds. On the other, Singh’s work shares in the metaphysical claim that khaali makes to ‘absent presences’ and the forms of inhabitation that emptiness offers. This resonance becomes clear in Chairs, where Singh senses the intense presence of generations that once occupied a now-empty room. Singh’s 2001 show titled Empty Spaces and her Museum of Shedding might also be thought of as odes to khaali.

The atmosphere or ambience or milieu of a place or a time The word mahaul is used, in Indian aesthetic traditions, to refer to the mood created by a performance. Singh encountered the impact of mahaul most intensely during her time with Indian classical musicians. Many of these musicians, Singh noticed, were master elicitors of mahaul, able to set the mood of their concerts with the smallest of gestures—tuning the tanpura, for instance, adjusting the microphone, or making eye contact with certain members of the audience. Singh also noticed that on many occasions the ambience of the green room seemed to carry forth onto stage and shape the mahaul of the concert. Mahauls seemed to be both intricately crafted and self-willed. Singh learnt from these musicians how to sense and order the intensities generated by works of art, as well as how to summon the architectures of affect within which works might thrive. In keeping with this learning, she attempts to create a mahaul for each of her book events— both as a way in which to structure how her work is experienced, and so as to allow the work to choreograph all that enters its ambit. Over the course of her career, Singh found that mahauls surround not only works of art but also people, simply by virtue of how they inhabit a space. In this regard Singh believes that Mona Ahmed was mahaul herself.

Markin is an unbleached cotton cloth that is used industrially to cover postal packages, to wrap files and documents at bureaucratic institutions, and as shrouds for bodies during funerary practices. It is usually the cheapest cloth available, and has a rough, unfinished texture. Singh used Markin to make the covers of Sent a Letter , the wrappings for her Pothi Boxes , and the veils for her museums as they waited in her home. She finds that the bare, almost ascetic qualities of Markin find their footing in the systems of finitude within which she conceptualises her form. Singh looked also to Indian classical music as she considered the question of what it is that one might wrap one’s work in. When it came to building a case for her first book-cart and travelling with it to the Venice Biennale, Singh visited the Rikhi Ram Musical Instrument Store in Connaught Place, Delhi, famous for having built sitar cases for Ravi Shankar. Singh convinced the owner of the store to build a case for her book-cart, arguing that it was as precious to her as Ravi Shankar’s sitar was to him. Devising how to transport her work in ways that are both efficient and befitting has been a key preoccupation for Singh. She first visited Rikhi Ram with Zakir Hussain, who was similarly invested in designing the perfect case for his tablas.

A musical framework within which to narrate and improvise a mood In Indian classical music, a raga offers a grammatical relationship between notes. This grammar is not rule-bound but born instead of a gradually developed understanding of the various combinations in which its scale might rearrange itself. These combinations are at once infinite and rigorously constrained. They rely on a musician’s ability to generate new routes within them. Singh finds in raga a mechanism by which to work with limitation and structure while still remaining open to possibility and chance. Singh’s museums are perhaps the clearest instantiation of raga in her work. Each museum holds within itself the potential to be endlessly rearranged, while still upholding an internal affective logic and specificity of mood.

Riyaaz is the daily labour that an Indian classical musician puts into his or her form. It is an attempt to rehearse and cultivate both the technical skills associated with musical performance, and the temperament and emotional fibre of a musician. Riyaaz builds not only a musician’s performative prowess but also provides a technique by which to channel the force of routine towards the making of a musician’s self. As such, riyaaz is both an aesthetic aspiration and an attempt to acquire an ethical subjectivity worthy of its challenge. Singh relies on riyaaz to inculcate rhythms of repetitive labour within her practice, as a disciplining of the self that joins her daily routine to the modalities within which her work transforms.

Rhythmic cycles, referred to in Indian classical music as taal, provide the grids across which a raga unfolds. The tempic structure and intervals of repetition offered by taal find resonance in two key aspects of Singh’s work. First, in the three-by-four contact sheets into which Singh arranges and archives her images, such that each image exists already embedded within a larger relational network of images, across which patterns and variations emerge. Second, in the various tempos of character and mood into which Singh’s books come to be sequenced. One might argue, then, that Singh’s work pertains not to stand-alone images but to rhythmic cycles of images. Singh feels a visceral connection to the ways in which her images harness rhythm—the curvatures of their ascent, the pulsations of intensity within which they grow, and the qualities of tension that characterise their return to the foundational beat or ‘sam’.

Within Indian classical music, taleem is understood as a long-term tutelage or apprenticeship. The undertaking of taleem involves a dedicated practice by which one submits to being remoulded by one’s guru. The process of taleem is underpinned by ascetic rigour. It is a measure of one’s readiness to receive one’s form. Taleem requires, and inculcates, a need to remain constantly open to failure. Singh sees the process of taleem as a development of the courage required to start over and over and over again, and to recognise the ability to do so as an opportunity. Singh’s guru Zakir Hussain refers to taleem as the process by which one invests in “learning to learn”.