Hatje Cantz Verlag

The latest catalog from Palestinian artist Ahlam Shibli, known for her rigorous documentation of life under oppression, serves as an index of the visual culture of martyrdom in the embattled city of Nablus in the West Bank. Shibli’s “Death” series (2011–12) focuses on the relics that remain after an individual dies. Posters on facades, flyers and family shrines all participate in a culture of disappearance that ensures that lives lost continue to incite calls to action. Shibli creates a matrix of reverence, desire and devastation through color photographs that, when read in succession, create an image of “collective annihilation.” Phantom Home is a poignant reflection on a medium, showing how images persist as more than mere signifiers, effecting real consequences on those who perceive them.

STEIDL

File Room is a homage to paper: from its textures and smells to its manifestation as a keeper of knowledge. Black-and-white photographs of India’s government archives flow through the book, each offering a different facet of these cavernous spaces. For Dayanita Singh, the project has become an obsession, giving her a euphoric rush every time she enters a repository of ordered chaos, a room full of secrets. With every square-format photograph, readers look through a window into another world, discovering ghostly, vacant spaces amid the mountainous files, enveloped by paper tides. First-person narratives by Aveek Sen lace the images with intimacy. Singh has described herself as a “bookmaker working with photography,” so it is fitting that the book’s aesthetics make it a highly desirable object.

Hatje Cantz Verlag

A book detailing a show of early Bauhaus artists held in Calcutta in 1922 barely requires further enticement. Fresh from a rapturous reception in Germany the previous year, Rabindranath Tagore helped young Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch, a teacher at his university at Shantiniketan, to bring work by the core of the European avant-garde, including Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten, to exhibit alongside a ragbag of late Bengal School artists that encompassed a few masters such as Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose. With no installation photographs and only one copy of the original catalog surviving, this austere, elegant volume, published alongide a show at Bauhaus Dessau, is a vital record of intertwining modernisms, unexpected diasporas, educational revivals and occasional misunderstandings across two continents.

Moderna Museet and Koenig Books

Tala Madani’s 2006 painting Rip Image adorns the catalog for her recent show at Malmö’s Moderna Museet and sets its tone—a burly but obscured man holds an image of himself torn in half. Inside, Madani’s explorations of doubleness, self-reflexivity and the innards and outards of flesh are dissected by some sharp minds. Five vantage points are proffered on Madani’s works of eroticism and repulsion: two essays, an artist interview and a short story extract by writer Nam Le that brings Madani’s clumsy male protagonist briefly to life. Occasionally the voices get lost in a soup of generalizations concerning the Arab world, global paternalism and American propaganda, but perhaps it’s not so bad to be talking in circles—for Madani, the spiral is a motif that highlights the passage but perhaps not the progress of time.