Dayanita Singh is the winner of the 2022 Hasselblad Award. With this book, the internationally celebrated artist Dayanita Singh returns to her artistic beginnings. In the catalogue for the first comprehensive retrospective, the first stop of which is hosted by the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, Singh presents early works from her 1980-1986 oeuvre. From hundreds of slides and contact prints, the artist made a selection of personal and powerful black-and-white photographs. As a rediscovery and look into her own past, the theme of the "archive", central to Singh's work, takes on a central dimension here. The media of photography, installation and book intertwine in Singh's work in a unique way, which is why this book also features recent photographs from the exhibition.

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the "infrastructures of the sensible."

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the "infrastructures of the sensible."

Gods in the Bazaar is a fascinating account of the printed images known in India as "calendar art" or "bazaar art," the color-saturated, mass-produced pictures often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring women, movie stars, chubby babies, and landscapes. Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, village huts; hung on walls, stuck on scooters and computers, propped up on machines, affixed to dashboards, tucked into wallets and lockets. In this beautifully illustrated book, Kajri Jain examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features. Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies-of art, commerce, religion, and desire-within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated. For Jain, an analysis of the bazaar, or vernacular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within the bazaar but also India's postcolonial modernity and the ways that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neoliberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. Jain argues that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of these multiple coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; the official and the vernacular.

Art History and Emergency assesses art history's role and responsibilities in what has been described as the "humanities crisis"-the perceived decline in the practical applications of the humanities in modern times. This timely collection of critical essays and creative pieces addresses several thought-provoking questions on the subject. For instance, as this so-called crisis is but the latest of many, what part has "crisis" played in the humanities' history? How are artists, art historians, and professionals in related disciplines responding to current pressures to prove their worth? How does one defend the practical value of knowing how to think deeply about objects and images without losing the intellectual intensity that characterizes the best work in the discipline? Does art history as we know it have a future? Distributed for the Clark Art Institute