Bøger udgivet af Spector Books

Ape Culture traces the long cultural and scientific obsession with humanity's closest relatives. In the Western historical representations of modernity, depictions of apes were traditionally used to show the absence of culture. Standing as a liminal figure separating humans and animals, the ape has, since ancient times, played a central role in the narrative of civilisational progress. This book, which appears in conjunction with the exhibition of the same nameseeks, however, to go beyond the mere examination of apes as signifiers of difference. The juxtaposition of artworks with documents taken from popular culture and the history of primatology gives the reader an insight into what the science historian Donna Haraway has termed the primate order -- a hall of mirrors reflecting the scientific and cultural projections that turned the ape from an instrument of humanity's self-definition into an integral element in testing out the possibility of reconstructing human nature. Ape Culture will be shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 30 April to 6 July 2015.

Berlin-based Argentinian sculptor Tomás Saraceno (born 1973) offers a glimpse into his practice through reflections on collective coproduction, the legacy of avant-garde digital works and the demands of producing large-scale interactive sculpture, using his Flying Plaza project as a case study.

For 15 years, Swiss documentary photographer Jules Spinatsch (born 1964) has been creating panoramas of various spaces--football stadiums, the Vienna Opera Ball, a prison, the SAP headquarters--by combining thousands of individual images. Spinatsch's series and his creative process are documented in this volume.

What happens when photographers and artists incorporate hobbies into their work as a means of challenging established practices and hierarchies? How do hobbyists represent their passions photographically, particularly today, in our era of digital communication and cell phone cameras? The Hobbyist is the first major publication to explore the relationship between photography and hobby culture, in connection both to the photographing of hobbies and to photography as a hobby. From the hippy cultures and avant-garde tendencies of the 1960s through the DIY culture of the 1980s to today's maker movement, The Hobbyist explores photography's engagement with a wide variety of lively, often quirky obsessions. The book, produced in a magazine format to accompany an exhibition at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, brings together short anecdotal texts, artist interview, in-depth essays and works by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Bill Owens, Chris Burden and Mike Mandel.

On the personal narratives that exist alongside architecture Cities are full of stories--running in parallel, contradictory, overlapping and inseparably linked. Such stories are told in Living the City, referencing various projects from architecture, art and urban planning. The book aims to show processes and possibilities for action in cities based on more than 50 projects from all over Europe. The publication first looks at urbanites before expanding into emotionally and poetically charged stories that consider basic activities such as loving, living, moving, working, learning, playing, dreaming, and participating in the city. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the former airport in Tempelhof, Berlin. Contributors include: Assemble, ateliermob, Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, Civic Architects, Crimson Historians and Urbanists, Eutropian, Larissa Fassler, Jeppe Hein, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lacaton & Vassal, No Shade, Olalekan Jeyifous, Ahmet Ögüt, Planbude, raumlaborberlin, Rotor DC, The Black Archives, White Arkitekter and Zones Urbaines Sensibles.

In Untitled Overgrowth, Berlin-based photographer Lukas Hoffmann (born 1981) focuses on traces of human presence in found environments, photographing cracks and plant overgrowth on man-made materials such as asphalt, masonry and building facades.

The Term Paranomia has multiple meanings, on of them beeing that which exists alongside the normative. In this inquiry into the entangled aspects of science and contemporary art, Christoph Keller draws a compelling outline of how knowledge is derived in these respective fields. The present publication assembles a series of texts, interviews, works and projects around this topic.

A visionary assemblage of historical, present-day and speculative material on space colonies, inspired by the culture of the Whole Earth CatalogAt the beginning of the 1970s, American physicist Gerard K. O'Neill developed the first ideas for colonizing space. Shortly thereafter, Stewart Brand, cyber-communard and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, took up these ideas and published the book Space Colonies in 1977. Space Colonies, an edition of Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly, funded by the proceeds of the Whole Earth Catalog, took up the question of whether space might be colonized by the year 2000. Artist Fabian Reimann takes up Brand and O'Neill's particular strain of techno-utopianism in Space Colonies: A Galactic Freeman's Journal. In his photo-essay Reimann assembles historical, present-day and speculative material, combining these with fictional and factual stories to create a composite of different images of the world. With global ecological disaster an even more pressing issue than it was in 1977, and the colonization of space still touted by some as a last-ditch resort, Reimann looks back at the dreams and nightmares of the 1970s with a sophisticated visual humor.Fabian Reimann (born 1975) is an artist working in Leipzig and, since 2004, the editor of the "ego-zine" Freeman's Journal. His Another Earth Catalog, which refers back to Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, was published by Spector Books in 2012. Reimann works with sculpture, photography, collage, painting and text in extended research projects that blend history and science, and fact and fiction.

Berlin-based photographer Andrzej Steinbach (born 1983) uses photographic portraiture to play games with identity and identification. This new publication is Steinbach's attempt to argue, through photographic tryptichs, that we should distrust binary systems of organization and instead think in terms of triads.

Susanne Kriemann's artist's book P(ech) B(lende), Library for Radioactive Afterlife looks at the political and actual invisibility of the highly radioactive mineral pitchblende (uraninite). From 1946 to 1989 pitchblende was mined in the Erzgebirge (Ore) Mountains in an area contained within the former GDR and was an important component in the USSR's nuclear arsenal. The publication brings together seven texts viewing the subject with a literary eye through the lens of media theory. All the texts deal with the documentation of radioactive materials, their effects, and afterlife. The book P(ech) B(lende) ties in with Kriemann's exhibition Pechblende (Chapter 1) at the Ernst Schering Foundation in Berlin (17, March to 5, June 2016). The work was previously on show at Prefix ICA in Toronto under the title Pechblende (Prologue).

Architecture students reflect on how a modern-day Bauhaus might lookIssue 11 of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation's journal celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, capturing special moments and places in Bauhaus history. Bauhaus 11 invites 100 architecture students from around the world to share their radical ideas, inspired by the Bauhaus.

In this volume, organizers and curators of the censored 2015 exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign reflect on the controversial show, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.

In the mid-1930s, the Polish photographer Stefan Kielsznia recorded five streets in the Jewish quarter of Lublin. He recorded the streets house by house, each time photographing the lower storeys with their small bars, stores and workshops. Kielsznia's detailed images show the window displays and the hand-painted billboards above the shop entrances; they show the faces of the people hurrying past, their clothes, their postures, their movements. It is the animate everyday itself that is present here in all its particularities and that constitutes the special atmosphere of each image. This is why Kielsznia's photo series is such a unique source of the Polish-Jewish life in Lublin only few years before the Holocaust. The publication Ulica Nowa 3 originated as an initiative of the artist Ulrike Grossarth and constitutes a catalogue of the entire known inventory of the photographs. For the first time, all 145 existing images from Stefan Kielsznia's street series are made available in printed form. Essays on the photo-historical classification of these pictures as well as on the Jewish history of Lublin over the centuries allow the viewer to learn more about the context of the photographs' origin and the record of the everyday which they offer.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Fotomuseum Winterthur--a key institution in the history of photographic collecting--this publication presents 25 photographic portraits of museum employees taken by German photographer Anne Morgenstern. Each of these employees has selected a photograph from the collection and shares their personal relationship to the work.

German artist Natalie Czech (born 1976) photographs pages (and other printed media) that feature texts by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara or Aram Saroyan--texts that she amends in various ways to produce new poetical works. This book surveys her works.

In March 2009 Cologne's historical Stadtarchiv collapsed: a catastrophe that can be seen as a consequence of a neoliberal programme of urban redevelopment. Yet for all that, critiques of neo-liberalism often run into difficulty because they lack a clearly defined object to focus on. Faced with structural complexities, their analysis and criticism is often directed towards isolated instances. Arne Schmitt confronts this tendency in his book with a resolutely straightforward approach, or -- to use a key concept from the accompanying text by writer Thorsten Krämer -- with uncomplexity. On a clearly mapped-out walk through Cologne, Schmitt photographs architecture from different periods, all in black and white. The images and the form of the book thus refer back to the theme-oriented photo-books of the 1950s and 1960s, in which political and social critiques of the day were combined with photographic depictions of the city -- a level of achievement that is well worth recapturing.

The iconography of contemporary media: three series by German artist Yvon ChabrowskiGerman photographer and conceptual artist Yvon Chabrowski (born 1978), based in Berlin and Leipzig, analyzes visual formulas of contemporary media, which she decontextualizes, revealing their underlying mechanisms and manipulation strategies. This publication presents three series of works from the last decade.

Robert Morris' sculptural installation Hearing includes an audio recording of a fictitious hearing that is focussed on the aesthetic, political, historical and moral views of a witness. The work is taken as a point of departure. Investigations relating to the various issues involved will take works of other artists into consideration. Hearing appears today as a piece of literature. Gregor Stemmrich edited and commented Hearing by Robert Morris in English for the first time.

Loom Shuttles, Warpaths is a visual study of textiles and their global history--a history that is characterized by cultural, class and gender conflict, and one that sheds light on the asymmetrical relationships between Europe and Latin America, as exemplified by the production and culture of Andean textiles. Created by Austrian artist Ines Doujak (born 1959) and British novelist and memoirist John Barker (born 1948), the book explores the aesthetic and political implications of a collection of 48 Andean textiles assembled over 35 years. Gorgeously produced with a cloth spine and tipped-in plates, the book consists of an inventory of this archive; posters created by Doujak that visually interpret the textiles in the style of fashion magazine covers, which are themselves accompanied by texts showing how these textiles are entangled with imperialist history; and further writings on the politics of textiles by both of the collaborators.

Kai Schiemenz is interested in the effects architecture has on people. He does not provide information about these effects using maps and charts but rather by means of experiments, via the experience of space presented in model form. The influence of the constructivists on his built sculptures is unmistakeable here. For his current series of ceramics, he worked together with a tile maker, who produces the tiling for the Berlin underground network. "In this project Kai Schiemenz enters a terrain -- unlike with glass, another material that he works with -- that is not right in the mainstream but has been spectacularly revitalized in recent years by sculptors," writes Susanne Altmann in the catalogue. The publication brings together installation views and glass and ceramic pieces made by the artist.

Berlin-based Austrian artist Herbert Stattler (born 1966) translates Woher kommen die kleinen Kinder?, a sex education book from 1957, into an artist's book containing 42 pencil drawings and reproductions of the original print. The Swiss-style cut-flush binding allows for the removal and display of individual pages.

Documenting German performance duo Prinz Gholam's choreographic workSince 2001 Berlin-based performance artists Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam, otherwise known as Prinz Gholam, have been critiquing constructs of the self and the body. Following in the spirit of their self-published booklets, this artist's book catalogs their performances.

This publication from the Wohnungsfrage series presents artist Amy Siegel's project, which juxtaposes the photographic and the epistolary, race and class, and gentrification and displacement in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Amie Siegel is an artist based in New York whose works range from photography, film, and video to performance, often tracing the undercurrents of economic and political cycles. The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) project Wohnungsfrage investigates the fraught relationship between architecture, housing, and social reality in an exhibition of experimental housing models, an international academy, and a publication series that examines various options for self-determined, social and affordable housing. This publication series presents key historical works accompanied by new commentaries, contemporary case studies from around the world, and publications by activists concerned with urban policy issues, architects, and artists.

The second in a series of publications documenting the work coming out of the Space for Visual Research workshop at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, this volume logs the recent visual experiments conducted at the laboratory using physics, chemistry, optics and reproduction technologies.

In the Soviet era, poet, critic and cultural theorist Victor Tupitsyn had already begun making recordings of his conversations with Russian conceptualist artists in their Moscow kitchens and studios.These recordings were intended for readers who had no access to this group of artists, whose work ran afoul of the official Soviet conceptions of art and thus was not shown in exhibitions. Like many other Russian intellectuals and artists, Tupitsyn emigrated to New York in the 1970s, where he continued the conversations he had begun. Victor Tupitsyn: Vis-à-vision collects Tupitsyn's conversations in full for the first time, featuring interviews with Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Komar&Melamid, Erik Bulatov and the groups Collective Actions and Inspection Medical Hermeneutics as well as many others. This body of interviews is an invaluable historical document of one of the most influential art tendencies of the late 20th century.

This book explores the female perspective in post-socialist Russia as conveyed in two films by Hamburg-based artist Lene Markusen (born 1973). The book includes drawings, stills and script excerpts from her films GRAD (2004) and Sankt: Female Identities of the Post-Utopian (2017).

The housing question is a universal question. Everywhere, it speaks differently but directly to the challenges that define our times: social inequality, ecological crisis, displacement, asylum, migration, and privatisation. The volume International Case Studies brings together contributions from Delhi, Hong Kong, Berlin, New York, London, and other cities around the globe. Its formats range from architectural research to literary and artistic projects. The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) project Wohnungsfrage investigates the fraught relationship between architecture, housing, and social reality in an exhibition of experimental housing models, an international academy, and a publication series that examines various options for self-determined, social and affordable housing. This publication series presents key historical works accompanied by new commentaries, contemporary case studies from around the world, and publications by activists concerned with urban policy issues, architects, and artists.

The digital age has changed photography; images circle the globe in seconds and involve us in a conflicted present. Just as in the nineteenth century, when industrialization caused cities to grow in leaps and bounds and reportage emerged as a new form of narrative disseminated by the mass media -- a transmitter of urban experience -- it is imperative today to come to a renewed understanding of what photographic modalities are appropriate for conveying an image of the world. The publication produced in conjunction with the 7th f/stop Festival for Photography in Leipzig is a passionate plea for a photography that chronicles events: artistic photographs appear next to press images, private snapshots next to historical reportage. For this community of images is what constitutes photography: not one single image but all of them. With photographs from Khaled Barakeh, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Capa, Monika Haller, Familie Khalil, Jens Klein, Andreas Langfeld, Gilles Raynaldy, Gerda Taro, Erik van der Weijde, Jonas Zilius.

Provence Report is a biannual arts and culture magazine showcasing contemporary fashion, criticism, art, music, literature and photography. The winter 2018-2019 edition features stories about artists using their skills in the service of others and explores conceptions of artistic value and labor.

The first full survey of German photographer Christian Borchert's black-and-white photographs of GDR Dresden and BerlinAccompanying the first comprehensive retrospective on Christian Borchert (1942-2000), this catalog surveys the photographer's life and work. Gathering text, photographs and archival material, the book focuses on Borchert's precise archival activities and their role in his understanding of photography.