Bøger udgivet af Spector Books

A fascinating account of the early development of the infographicAt the beginning of the 20th century, an unprecedented volume of information began circulating in the mass media, calling for the development of new visualization tactics to organize it all. The abundance of news and information required new forms of representation that would allow readers to glean a quick understanding of complex circumstances at a glance; the infographic was born. Image Factories is dedicated to the pioneering infographics of Austrian physician and illustrator Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) and German philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945), who both worked with graphic designers to realize their groundbreaking information visualizations. Presenting historical material and imagery designed between 1920 and 1945 alongside contemporary infographics, with a series of essays by Helena Doudova, Stephanie Jacobs, Patrick Rössler, Bernd Stiegler, Vilém Flusser and Otto Neurath, Image Factories offers a fascinating account of the early development of the infographic.

Long before scientists took the possibility of travelling to the Moon seriously, virtually all of its aspects had already been explored in art and literature. Our nearest astronomical neighbour, the Moon -- just three days journey by spacecraft -- still serves as an object of creative projection and speculation for visionaries across the globe. More than five decades after the first moonwalk, the book Memories of the Moon-Age traces a visual cultural history of lunar exploration in snapshots from the past, present, and future. This inspiring journey through history ranges from Ptolemy's early calculations of the distance from the Earth to the Moon and Galilei's invention of the telescope and his pen drawings of the lunar surface to the golden age of space travel in the mid-twentieth century with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the concrete preparations for the Apollo Moon landing.

Ilit Azoulay moved into a studio at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin in June 2013 and used her five-month residency to develop her interest in the archaeology of cities. During her travels throughout Germany, she collected and photographed objects and architectural fragments in towns and cities from Berlin to Bamberg, as well as in the KW building itself. In the process she developed narratives about her finds based on correspondence with squatters, botanists, and taxidermists. For her exhibition Shifting Degrees of Certainty at KW, Azoulay presented ninety-three photographed objects in a site-specific installation, combined with an audio guide. This publication accompanies the exhibition and examines the project's archival character. It contains images of the work on view, along with all the texts from the installation's audio guide.

Looked at in isolation, each of British artist Merlin James's paintings is, figuratively speaking, a signal box, an appeal addressed to the viewer in a conscious play with the semantic elements of the picture. From September 18 to November 10, 2013, his exhibition Signal Box was on view at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. It spanned three decades of his work, representing his range of imagery and genres, as well as his technical and stylistic approaches. Following this exhibition, the second book in the series KW Pocket, Signal Box, was published. The book contains exhibition views, a selection of images of important works, and a conversation between Merlin James and Ellen Blumenstein, chief curator of KW.

Manfred Paul is one of the main exponents of 'auteur photography', and as a teacher he opened the eyes of several generations of photographers and designers. The work En passant was created in passing in the period from 1986 to 1990 in East Berlin. It consists of severely cropped black-and-white pictures of women's legs, which only reveal the lower half of the person portrayed: from the waist down, and sometimes only from the knee. They are all elegant, at times even glamorous, which leads us to indulge in further speculation about the women. The images observe a strict photographic language, as developed by the artists of the Neues Sehen movement a hundred years ago. However, Paul's series can be clearly dated to the East Berlin of the 1980s -- this is indicated by small details, such as broken cobblestone surfaces, sheer tights with a relatively coarse weave, or a characteristic style of shoe typical of that period.

The photographer Jens Klein was invited by the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst to produce an image book. He decided to sift through the application documents of over eight thousand scholarship holders from the 1950s on who had submitted analogue passport photographs to accompany their applications. Covering a period from 1950 to 2012, Klein selected 176 photographs of applicants who had received support from the foundation: a kind of transverse look across time and a visual chronicle reflecting Germany's history and the evolution of photography. The photographs show how the medium has changed over the years: from black and white to colour, from an analogue to a digital medium, from elaborate studio shots to quick photo-booth pictures. In 2012, the Studienwerk introduced an online application process, thus ending the era of analogue images.

The archive of the Photo Service of the President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia contains nearly 300,000 photographs documenting Josip Broz Tito's public and private activities from 1948 until his death in 1980. It is housed today in the Museum of Yugoslav History (MYH) in Belgrade. In 2012, the MYH curatorial staff initiated Travelling Communiqué, a title taken from the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in September 1961. It represents an ongoing collective project that opened this summer to the public with an exhibition, a summer school, and a film programme. The working journal is dedicated to the pioneering spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement and to Tito's photo archive.

The title of Matthias Hamann's new photo book is taken from a piece of graffiti found on a trash bin in New York, which the artist photographed on his wanderings through the American metropolis. You Would can be read as a challenge or an invitation, or as a possible instruction for anyone who surrenders to change and steps into the light of the camera. The author takes a diaristic approach to recording his impressions as a flâneur in New York and Berlin, mixing the photographs he takes with staged portraits of the queer scene. You Would shows intimate moments and poses from a social circle with an alternative take on life.

Figure I and Figure II are two young women who immediately confuse the viewer. Figure I is photographed against a neutral background, striking various different poses and dressed in an assortment of clothes that make it impossible to ascribe her a fixed role. Depending on which photograph you are looking at, the figure may look more female or more male -- there is no way to resolve the ambiguity. The same is true for Figure II: she stands in front of a lamella curtain, trying on a tube cowl. As with Figure I, there can be no clear-cut role assignment, which is the effect Steinbach is striving for. His two black-and-white portrait series ask the viewer to look carefully and make comparisons -- reminiscent of Marianne Wex's photo studies. The artist plays with the gestural language of fashion photography, which he repeatedly subverts, paring away at the image to reveal the residual identities of his models.

Acts of Voicing focuses on the aesthetic, performative, and political significance of the voice, viewed from the perspective of visual art, dance, performance, and theory. The book, which also documents the exhibition of the same title that showed at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2012, explores the diegetic and performative characteristics of the voice. This relates equally to voices that resist and to voices that are disciplined and seek to discipline, to those that are heard and to those that go unheard. The book also examines the struggle to find one's voice and the act of getting voices to speak or be silent.

In the spring of 2014, as part of the Theater der Welt festival, the architects' collective raumlaborberlin put out a call for budding designers to create the hotel room of their dreams for the City of Mannheim. An international jury panel selected twenty-two designs, which were constructed in an public workshop in front of the National Theatre and then put up in distinctive locations around the city. Temporary sleeping installations made of wood, sheets of greenhouse glass, and plastic trays sprang up in the port of Mannheim, in pedestrian zones, and in parks, some of them screened off to provide privacy and some not. During the festival theatregoers had the option to spend a night in the experimental dwellings. The publication uses texts and a variety of colour images to document the process of creating HOTEL shabbyshabby and the reactions of guests.

Ioana Nemeș is recognised as one of the most remarkable figures of the new generation of Romanian contemporary artists. This publication offers an initial overview of the long-term projects and singular exhibitions that Nemeș produced during her brief but extraordinary career. Fascinated with time, language, and non-linear narrativity, Ioana Nemeș' practice was predicated on an ongoing and unconstrained process of self-evaluation. On the slippery margins between art and life, the Monthly Evaluations project, realised in different formats and media, is testament to the artist's willingness to bring into the open her subjective experiences, dialogues, and confrontations with her own context and circumstances. Ioana Nemeș' artistic environment, with all its strength and fragility, contrasts with a precise, almost surgical survey of the moods, desires, and situations that she experienced from day to day, becoming the basis for her enigmatic scenarios, which take the form of written statements.

Archivo F. X. is based on an archive that Pedro G. Romero has been compiling since 1999. It consists of more than a thousand documents that link the story (stories) of anticlerical iconoclasm in Spain with positions adopted by the international avant-garde. Drawing on this steadily expanding pool of material, Romero develops different ways of presenting the F. X. archive. In the process, the content's frame of reference finds itself continually readjusting to cater to such factors as the urban environment, community, knowledge, and economics. The staging of Archivo F. X. that was specially conceived for the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart was designed as memory theatre, archive, and imaginary museum. It sets up an unusual dialogue with the artists Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Joseph Beuys, and Alexander Kluge.

Amok is André Gelpke's personal commentary on the absurdities of our lives. True to the artist's motto, "Photography is a whore, never faithful, always feigning," Gelpke uses the medium to formulate his subjective view of the world. Without being explanatory or anecdotal, he examines, with the help of the camera, the small, naturally occurring settings of everyday life. Along with Michael Schmidt and Heinrich Riebesehl, Gelpke is one of the most important writer-photographers in post-war Germany. Amok brings together for the first time images taken over a period of twelve years, from 2002 to 2014. Co-published with cpress, Zurich.

Does art have the potential to stimulate and sustain political participation? On behalf of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Joanna Warsza invited the artists Alexandra Pirici, Pablo Helguera, and Ulf Aminde to Leipzig to try out three projects in public and semi-public spaces: Pirici staged a choreographic intervention at the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, Helguera an improvised speaking choir, and Aminde the dress rehearsal for an art strike. All the works were shown as part of the Performative Democracy series, whose title is taken from the book of the same name by Polish sociologist Elżbieta Matynia. It describes people as politically active creatures whose collective significance is derived from their actions. The publication Art in Times of Gray Democracy brings to a close the Performative Democracy series. It is produced in magazine format.

Katarina Zdjelar's video, sound, and text works all document a moment of physical expression, which takes on visual and audible form in the transition from speech to music. They show how historical and geopolitical forces impinge on individual or collective desires. Take, for example, The Perfect Sound (2009), in which the artist recorded a session conducted by an English speech therapist, as he helps an immigrant to lose his foreign accent using voice-training exercises specifically designed for the purpose. The therapist intonates and the patient copies the alien sounds. The voice training is aimed at new arrivals in the country to help facilitate their smooth integration into British society and protect against abuse--this, at least, is the intention of the authorities. The publication Towards a Further Word is based on Zdjelar's solo exhibition at the Bielefelder Kunstverein in 2014 and brings together a selection of works from the last six years.

When Dessau was bombed in early 1945, the Bauhaus Masters' Houses, the epitome of the 20th-century artists' colony, were reduced to rubble as well.After the main Masters' Houses were restored to their original state in the 1990s, Walter Gropius's Director's House and László Moholy-Nagy's Master's House were still in ruins, and a debate began over their reconstruction. What was the relevance of these structures at the turn of a new century? In 2010, after consultation with the British architect David Chipperfield, the decision was made to reinterpret the House Gropius and House Moholy-Nagy using contemporary means, rather than rebuilding them as 1:1 reconstructions. The Berlin firm Bruno-Fioretti-Marquez was commissioned to design new Masters' Houses. These new structures use the same formal vocabulary of simple, functional forms and right angles as the original Bauhaus buildings, but update these for the 21st century through selective reduction and abstraction. The project represents a unique, thoughtful engagement with the problems of architectural reconstruction grounded in criticality and creativity rather than blind reverence. The New Masters' Houses in Dessau, 1925-2014 describes the checkered history of the Dessau Masters' Houses and presents the reconstructed buildings for the first time in book form, with photographs by Armin Linke and Heidi Specker.

The curators of architecture exhibitions are often concerned with the problem of how to present objects that ultimately cannot be brought into the exhibition space. Such shows are often difficult for lay audiences to interpret; little focus is placed on communication. However, there are also architecture exhibits that concentrate on communicating an experience. They make it possible to build an intense relationship between the audience and the content on display. This publication focuses on the question of how space can be orchestrated at an exhibition to negotiate an architectural idea. Bringing together pieces by theoreticians, curators and practitioners involved in exhibition production, Displayed Spaces contributes toward the analysis of contemporary architecture exhibitions.

Tempelhofer Feld, the former inner-city airport of Berlin, has for several years been the stage for an ongoing contestation at all levels of society. The question of what to do with such an immense open space of four square kilometers in the middle of the city has unleashed an unprecedented chain of actions and reactions. On Tempelhofer Feld does not formulate yet another alternative design for the field. Instead, it searches for a nuanced and multilayered interpretation by means of a photographic documentation of the site and conversations with academics and spatial professionals. By going through the field's recent history, situating it in the context of Berlin's turbulent past, laying out the socio-demographic situation of the surrounding neighborhoods, focusing on urban development, and discussing master plans that "weren't meant to be," On Tempelhofer Feld reflects on the interaction between spatial practice and pressing societal concerns.

The role of photo agencies remains a blind spot in the history of photography. Emerging in the beginning of the 20th century to satisfy the picture-hunger of modern man (Tschichold), they transformed photography into a commodity. As catalysts for the picture market and through the creation of systematic collections, these companies shaped our western visual culture. The 1920s, 1930s and 1990s, in particular, ushered a paradigm shift in the economy of the medium, marked by major technological developments and the rise of new markets. Taking the example of the Bettmann Archive and Corbis - one of the world's largest photo agencies, founded by Bill Gates - the book Banking on Images inquires into the criteria used in selecting these images, the way in which the value of a commercial image bank is determined, and the concept of photography that lies behind it.

In 2011, Andreas Schulze lived in Paris thanks to a research grant. At some point, he visited the Louvre, let himself be swept up by the stream of tourists, looked at pictures, met an old friend and started to photograph his series Louvre. A reflection on the nature of image production in front of images, whose significance is granted by virtue of the famous exhibition location. In Text he writes about the feeling of stumbling around between images of torture, tenderness and all the humorous pictures in between. In the chapter Image he takes over the stage direction: He de-contextualizes media images in order to pair them in new groups of two. He develops his own grammar promoting patterns and forms from one page to the next. A visual narrative flow emerges with unexpected turns that reformulates the question of the origin of images.

Olaf Nicolai developed the work Le pigment de la lumière for the reconstructed Master's Houses in Dessau. It involved coating the walls with marble dust with varying degrees of granulation to create a geometrical pattern, thus producing a subtle relief that responds to the changing light conditions. In this work, Nicolai continues to pursue his artistic interest in grappling with the formal concept of camouflage, since, to begin with, the wall surfaces are almost invisible to the viewer. Heidi Specker gives Le pigment de la lumière a heightened sense of presence in her photography. Her pictures direct the gaze of the viewer to the contouring and the interplay of surface and space--a reflective phenomenon that is a calculated part of Nicolai's wall surfaces. In Nicolai and Specker's joint publication, an aesthetic intervention in the reconstructed space is further extrapolated using the medium of photography presented in book form.

Departing from the figure of the Taowu, a Chinese mythological monster of evil inclination used recently by historians and writers to symbolize the violent fate of Chinese utopian modernity, this publication interrogates the role of systemic and structural violence in the making of modernity and its artistic representations, and uses the monster as a vantage point to capture global dimensions of the current crisis of social imaginaries.

In Vasarely Go Home Andreas Fogarasi investigates a double event that took place in Budapest on October 18th, 1969. Opening that day, Victor Vasarely, the internationally renowned artist of Hungarian origin, had a large retrospective exhibition at the Mücsarnok/Kunsthalle in Budapest. While Hungarian avant-garde art of that time was forbidden or at best tolerated by the authorities, Vasarely's exhibition--organised by official cultural politics--became an important public event attracting a huge number of visitors. Because of these double standards at play, the show was met with both high expectations and scepticism from the local artistic scene. The second--undocumented--event taking place that evening during the exhibition opening was a one-person protest by artist János Major. He carried a small sign in his pocket that he discreetly showed to friends and acquaintances when he encountered them in the crowd. The sign read Vasarely Go Home.

Following the exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein and Kunsthaus Glarus in 2012 and 2013, this is the first monograph dedicated to the Swiss artist Luca Frei (b. 1976). In his artistic practice--from installations, sculptures, drawings and paintings to exhibition design--Frei questions and revisits ideas and speculations about modernist forms. In particular, his interest is aimed at their potential to foster new perception and audience response. Rather than offering new interpretations and meanings, Frei's multi-faceted works and their arrangement in space follow a line of open-ended, associative, even participatory possibilities. The book introduces Frei's work in a similarly intertwined structure: six authors that have shared a long-term dialogue with the artist shed a personal light on Frei's practice from different angles. The book's title is borrowed from a novel by Gertrude Stein, and relates to the matters of time, change, and shifting perspectives that are central to Frei's work.

The photographer and political activist Miklós Klaus Rózsa (born 1954) was kept under surveillance for years by the Swiss Federal Office of Police, the Cantonal police, and the municipal police of Zurich. His photographs as well as the State Protection files compiled on him from 1971 - 1989 form the basis for the book. Christof Nüssli and Christoph Oeschger juxtapose the text produced by the state and the images produced by the monitored person. The collage of these sources produces new images that reveal the history of a politically agitated time in Switzerland. The two lines of narration could not be more antithetic: On the one hand are the images by Rózsa which document the events from the midst of the agitation, the Zurich youth movement of the 1980s. On the other hand the surveillance files demonstrate the distanced and often uncomprehending gaze of the police observing the occurrences. The montage brings the conflict between Rózsa's images and the State Security texts to light. Observation and counter-observation clash. The book will be published in cooperation with cpress, Zurich.

According to legend, the house in which Maria received the apparition of the Angel of Annunciation, the Santa Casa, was relocated by angels from Nazareth first to Dalmatia and then to Loreto. Since the 15th century, the Santa Casa of Loreto has become one of the most important Christian pilgrimage sites. In 2009, the artists Davide Cascio and Christian Kathriner developed a work that refers back to this legend. They created two wall carpets for the pilgrimage chapel of Our Lady of Hergiswald -- a replica of the Santa Casa in Loreto. The wall carpets, Jacquard tapestries, were woven on a CAD-operated loom in Flanders. The tapestries show a group of people apparently resting at the edge of a riverbed. The large-scale publication presents this temporary spatial installation by Davide Cascio and Christian Kathriner in striking color images that at the same time absorb the opulent decoration of the Baroque chapel of Hergiswald and simultaneously refract it within a contemporary aesthetics.

In his book Ornament City, Austrian artist Herbert Stattler transferred 16 designs of ideal cities into precise pencil drawings. Urban utopias from the Renaissance to the 20th century are reproduced by Stattler again and again, until the ideal city is multiplied into an ornament: fans and concentric circles, repeating bubbles and dispersing stars. In the detail however, in the movement of the pencil that repeats the original, there is a liveliness that counteracts the big plan in a congenial way. The design of the book draws on portfolios used by urban planners and draftsmen; pages are folded in a way that the drawings appear in their original size. Only at closer inspection does it become apparent that they are drawn in pencil. The line is not always perfect, and in consequence the drawing departs from the utopias of those architects who believed in perfect ideals of the city. Ornament City is published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Österreichisches Kulturforum in Berlin.

With Markings, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Spector Books are initiating a series of small-format, polymorph publications. They will be produced together with artists who have exhibited, intervened, or performed at the Kunst-Werke. The KW Pocket series aims to create a platform within which projects can be documented, continued or re-interpreted. Within the framework of the exhibition Relaunch (2013), the cooperation Markings between Nedko Solakov (artist) and Ellen Blumenstein (curator) inaugurated the new program of the institution Kunst-Werke. The reader of the book accompanies the artist and the curator on their walk through the building in Berlin's Auguststraße. The comments and markings that Nedko Solakov tagged with a black marker on walls, windows, passages, and doors allow the past to resurface, they revolve around the building's present and presence and sketch out ideas for its future. They act as an appropriation of the space and simultaneously as a self-representation of the institution. The series will be continued with titles by Georgia Sagri and Merlin James.

Between 1981 and 1983, Japanese photographer Seiichi Furuya, based in Graz, took photographs at the Austrian border towards the former Eastern block nations. In contrast to the media attention devoted to the inner German border and the division of Berlin, Furuya was searching for images in the inconspicuous and at times even idyllic border territories to Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. His associations of places and stories form a valuable historical document, shaped by the interplay between the private and the political, between personal view and documentary distance. On occasion of his solo show at the Heidelberger Kunstverein in 2014 this work will be published--30 years after its creation--in the form of a book.