Bøger udgivet af Spector Books

Jens Klein's (born 1970) Sunset depicts the places where people tried to escape across the East/West German border.The pictures, culled from the archives of the Stasi Records Agency, were taken by the secret police, the police and border troops from 1961 to 1989.

Lampedusa: Image Stories from the Edge of Europe is a photo-graphic novel developed by the Migrant Image Research Group examining how images of migration across the Mediterranean are made and circulated in the popular media and beyond.

In the summer of 2015, writer Roman Ehrlich (born 1983) and photographer Michael Disqué (born 1980) visited the German army base Camp Marmal in Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan.Their aim was to portray the life of the soldiers in the camp without falling back on the standard narratives of journalistic reportage. What Ehrlich and Disqué found themselves drawn to at Camp Marmal were the structures that the soldiers had created for themselves, the extreme artificiality of the living environment and the civilian aspects of life that persisted in the camp, despite it being a military organization. These banalities of war are at the heart of Theatre of War: the everyday life of the camp as seen in its offices, workshops and accommodation areas, in its utility hubs and kitchens, as the war's employees occupy their time waiting and contemplating.

Waste as material: recycling in designThe processes of global industrialization and mounting consumerism produce so much refuse on a daily basis that recycling and upcycling have become hot topics of vital global importance. Waste, a seemingly inexhaustible resource, has become a new kind of raw material for production. Designers are beginning to take a different view of the "useless" things that people discard: bulky waste, rubbish, cheap materials--in the right hands, these become pure gold. Pure Gold: Upcycled! Upgraded! explores the subject of recycling in design and presents ideas for using refuse to create valuable products.Working with seven curators from Europe, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South East Asia, Pure Gold brings together 53 designers and approximately 75 of their objects to explore value creation from garbage and scrap materials in European and non-European contexts.

Bauhaus 8 is given over to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation's annual theme for 2016: Movement. Its focus is on new departures in society, change and speed, migration and mobility as well as art and dynamism, architecture and performance, flights of fancy and locomotor systems. In bauhaus 8 we encounter Kandinsky on a bicycle, Moholy-Nagy's Vision in Motion, Paul Klee overcoming gravity, Gropius's writing desk in exile, and Karla Grosch's programme of physical education at the Bauhaus as well as numerous other protagonists. The annual publication combines historical views with the contemporary positions of designers, artists, acrobats, choreographers, curators, and photographers. In the process it moves from the Bauhaus Building in Dessau to the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam, to the festival stage at the Festspielhaus Hellerau, to Lawn Road Flats in London, and other venues. A collection of essays, interviews, portraits, collages, illustrations, and artistic contributions.

TXT IMG brings together forty-one projects by Katharina Gaenssler, from her first photo installation in 2003 up to her latest project, Bauhaus Staircase, on display on the stairs of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Like her photo installations, where hundreds of single images come together to create a large-scale work, this monograph is shaped by the contrast between the fragment and the whole. It includes all the thirty-four texts that have been written to date about Gaenssler's work and every one of the 407,954 photographs she has taken to provide the material basis for her projects. The myriad tiny individual images combine on the pages of the book to form abstract colour sequences -- taken as a whole they can be interpreted anew, becoming a photographic manifestation somewhere between a colour code and a dynamic spatial expanse.

Heidi Specker's Re-prise is a reorchestration of Moï Wer's draft design for the book Ci-Contre. It is a superimposed layering of time - an echo, a mirror of illusory images. After finishing his studies at the Bauhaus Dessau at the beginning of the 1930s, the Lithuanian photographer Moshe Raviv Vorobeichic (Moï Wer) went to Paris, where he produced a maquette with 110 black-and-white photographs on forty-one double pages. In the process, he experimented with a dynamic layout to allow the images to communicate with one another. Specker has used Ci-Contre as a template for her work, giving a contemporary feel to the pictures by adding light and colour in order to impart an alien quality to golden shoes, red puddles, or grey concrete. Some of the double spreads create the impression that one is looking at the streaming images of a film. "The way Ci-Contre manifests in Re-prise is a natural result of the editing process." The book is published to coincide with the exhibition Reprise, jointly presented by the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Munich, which runs from 16 October 2015 until 6 March 2016.

Spain's speculative landscapes may be perceived as a test zone for a model of global urbanization that was introduced with neo-liberalization in the 1990s. The huge vacancy rate and the consumption of the landscape in the absence of users and low levels of demand testify to the dubiousness of a form of architectural production that is based purely on the speculative value of the built objects. Bauhaus Lab has developed critical positions, counter-models, and projects that engage with the implications of this form of urbanization.

He describes himself self-deprecatingly as the "most famous unknown artist" Frank Uwe Laysiepen aka Ulay. With his concept of transformation, he constantly creates new identities. His preferred medium is photography -- initially, in the form of the Polaroid, photography became an integral part of his earliest artistic practice. For Ulay the instant picture, which has now been replaced by the digital image, is the material in his decade-long search for a way to represent life. To this day, his body serves as the object of his research, on which various influences leave traces and can be read, just like on a canvas. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents the first-ever major overview of the works of the artist, which will be accompanied by a catologue covering photographs, performance art pieces, and works that Ulay has kept private for years and which are now being made public for the first time.

The Whirr of the Image Machine is a hybrid, polyphonic narrative form in which texts and images are intercut with one another. The narratives, like the images, are the work of different authors. They are positioned next to one another such that a commentary runs back and forth between them. The stories have their origins in audio interviews with nightwatchmen from all over the world, discussions that the artist ThomasTaube made a conscious choice not to conduct himself. He sent a catalogue of questions to eight different people: nightwatchmen in Kabul, Tokyo, Yaoundé, and five other cities gave accounts of their lives and the work they do during the night. Based on these nighttime conversations, Taube shot the film Dark Matters (2014). The Whirr of the Image Machine is another attempt to interweave different narrative threads, this time in the form of a book.

"Darwin said the greatest live simulation is nature herself, who incessantly tries and fails aloud, never stopping at perfection. But nature is often too fast, too slow, too big, too small for us. We need live simulation at scale with human spacetime, but unending in its variety and blind to our barometers of quality. A live simulation that we can feel, but does not give a fig for us," says artist Ian Cheng. Distorted views, mutated images, and varied texts are exemplary of Cheng's interest in behavioural change and the potential of working with live simulations. Live Simulations is the first monograph to visualize Cheng's artistic practice and make its principles tangible in book form.

Moscow, Spring 2014. Robert Hamacher spends two months touring the Russian metropolis. On his wanderings through the city, he photographs twelve-lane highways, public water fountains, gilded church domes, and a series of young people in their own flats. Some of them work as models; others are curators or artists. They tell stories of their daily life in Moscow, a city that does not care for those in need and where it is hard to lead a good and healthy life. The thoughts of this collection of young people circle around the questions of how to pursue a career and how to achieve an up-market lifestyle. Hamacher's portraits show young women and men drinking tea, smoking, or posing with their smartphones -- a picture of youth in search of a carefree life. The war in Ukraine seems a long way away here.

What do books that were never written tell us about their authors, about the book-lives they never lived? The Bauhaus book series was started in 1925 as an ambitious project and grand marketing campaign. The big issues and questions of modernism were to be dealt with by internationally renowed authors -- including one female author -- in more than fifty publications. In the end, only fourteen of them were published. Silent Partners is made up of three sequences dedicated to the never-published books. In each of the scenes, one unwritten Bauhaus book has a conversation with an object or an idea from within the book.

In a fictional dialogue with the French sociologist Bruno Latour and the philosopher Michel Serres, Tabea Michaelis sets off on a randonnée on Wilhelmsburg Island, which sits in the middle of the Elbe in Hamburg, and observes the everyday interaction of numerous human and non-human actors from the perspective of the actor-network theory. Using texts, photographs, open-ended stories, and drawings, she records sports cars tattooed with fancy designs on the side of the road, empty Yum Yum bags in front of building entrances, and the series of DIY constructions in the harbour area. Michaelis applies the iterative coding process of Grounded Theory and ultimately creates thirtyone conceptual terms reflecting the programme of the possible in a style both analytical and poetic. The book succeeds in bringing together the myriad episodes of a randonnée in the form of a catalogue, while its methodology affords us a new perspective of the city.

How might a resistive art be imagined, despite it being enmeshed in the economic structures that need to be countered? What other knowledge, and what other communities, can art foster? What tools and weapons can it supply? This publication is focused on three projects -- independent and interwoven in equal measure -- which explore and newly survey, each in their own way, the relations between art, politics, and knowledge generation. The three exhibitions include: 'Unrest of Form: Imagining the Political Subject, ' part of the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna and curated by Karl Baratta, Stefanie Carp, Matthias Pees, Hedwig Saxenhuber, and Georg Schöllhammer; 'Monday Begins on Saturday, ' part of the Bergen Assembly and curated by Ekaterina Degot and David Riff; and 'Giving Form to the Impatience of Liberty, ' at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and curated by Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler.

Timm Rautert's Image-Analytical Photography cycle may be considered one of the key photographic works of the 1960s and 1970s. It was produced at a time of radical discourse about the role of art in society. Drawing on the influence of conceptual art, which was still in its infancy at the time, Rautert focused on the conditions surrounding his own creative process, the question of authorship, original and copy, and the role of the viewer. His cycle of works deals with issues that, in view of the technical means photography had at its disposal and its notional claim to depict the world realistically and truthfully, assumed particular importance and urgency--as they still do today, especially given the digital image worlds that we now occupy. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Bildanalytische Photographie, 1968 -1974 at the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden (July 1st to September 25th, 2016), where the entire cycle was presented for the first time.

Trail harks back to a path that Natascha Sadr Haghighian laid out at the Auehang in Kassel in 2012 as part of dOCUMENTA (13). The trail was located next to a memorial to the fallen German soldiers of the two World Wars and accompanied by onomatopoeic sounds. In the process of laying out the path, Haghighian discovered that the entire slope consisted of rubble from the Second World War. In the book she follows the 'trail' of this debris together with Pola Sieverding and Jasper Kettner and ends up with the Kassel-based armaments industry, with stories of migration and forced labour, with military vehicles named after animals, and with flowers that only grow in rubble. Via an exchange of letters with Anselm Franke, Avery Gordon, Ayşe Guelec, and a number of other correspondents, the findings are linked and examined together, revealing a view of historical continuities, loops, and ruptures, resembling the layering of the debris itself.

Until tires burned on the Maidan, Ukraine was a blank spot on the map on the margin of Europe. The Maidan as a symbol and the location of month-long civil protests marks a new era which this book's authors capture in words and images. In 2012-2013 photographer Miron Zownir and Ukrainian writer and translator Kateryna Mishchenko visited the Ukraine to explore everyday life there. Zownir photographed drug addicts from Poltava, homeless people at Kiev's main station, street children in Odessa and Chernivtsi and the inhabitants of several Roma camps. Mishchenko's sensitive texts and Zownir's close-up images document the profound fault lines in Ukrainian society, in which the harbingers of revolution can already be felt.

André Gelpke's series Sex-Theater was produced in the 1970s and depicted performers from a number of different sex theatres in Hamburg's St. Pauli district. The fascination that captivated me as a photographer came from the personality of the individual, from the performer who was prepared to realize in public the secret sexual fantasies of an inhibited society, simply in exchange for a fee. Sex-Theater was first published as a book in 1981 and quickly sold out. The edition produced by Spector Books together with cpress represents a new staging of the series: it includes an expanded selection of images and new texts, and is presented in a form that offers this collection of photos a contemporary framing. The era that is depicted here is over, and the decline of these clubs is documented in Sex-Theater.

As of 2015 bauhaus journal will be published once a year, with that year's selected topic as the central feature of the issue. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is devoting its 2015 edition of the magazine to the collective and thus focuses on individualists, unorthodox thinkers, and solo artists. In the 1920s the Bauhäusler -- a group that includes not only teachers and students but also friends of the school -- saw themselves as members of a creative collective devoted to learning, working, and experimentation. They not only designed the products and visions of a new life but also tested them using their own models. The tenor and context of the collective concept changed several times in the fourteen years of the Bauhaus' existence: from the romantic notion of a cloistered community with an elitist vision via a model of cooperative collectivism to liberal ideas of team collaboration and networking.

The digitalization of museums is a global process that is changing our perception of these institutions. Museums, which used to guarantee that their exhibits could be appreciated in isolation, have now become accessible online 24/7. In Byproducts / Matters, Julian Irlinger works with the images that are produced via this process. Taking advantage of virtual museum tours, he uses screenshots to record snippets of the interior spaces, showing zoomed-in details of high-resolution art reproductions. The incidental becomes the image motif. The pictures display pixelated works of art, cleaning utensils that have been set aside, or the reflections of studio lights on the painting's varnish. The artist's books Byproducts and Matters are published as a double volume, creating their own spaces for the contexts and narratives associated with viewing art today.

In 2019 the Bauhaus will celebrate its hundredth anniversary! Preparations for the centenary have raised a host of questions: To what extent is the Bauhaus tied to a place, and how can its essence be conveyed in a museum? How can the tension between school and museum -- in particular the Bauhaus and its everyday presence -- be given a productive role in fashioning new models of cultural education? What stimuli can the Bauhaus provide for a critical practice in today's globalized world? In the process of compiling Bauhaus News, international Bauhaus experts, curators, historians, philosophers, artists, architects, educators, and teachers were asked to consider the Bauhaus from a twenty-first-century perspective. The book presents contrasting contemporary and historical statements and stories about the Bauhaus world heritage.

This series of still-life photographs by Manfred Paul was produced while the GDR still existed. As photographs, they go beyond the general symbols of still life; they are time doubly frozen: just as fish, leaves, and branches become frozen at the bottom of a lake, petrified in clear ice before the first snowfall, so the still life -- a life without time -- remains suspended, for as long as the picture's materiality can withstand the ravages of time. Things are abandoned, with apparent carelessness -- a bunch of tulips in a glass vase wilts in infinite beauty, their black-and-white sharpness emitting an almost painful appeal against the transience and replaceability of the blooms. In their irredeemable alienation they inevitably become a devotional mental image of human existence.

In the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, a large number of cinemas were built in both the urban and rural areas of South India. Their architecture is an unusual mix of Western influences and local building styles. The brightly coloured façades resemble stage sets and provide a foretaste of the film experience in the auditorium, where the extravagant forms and embellishments are continued, getting the audience in the mood for the cinematic world before the opening credits roll. One might call this architectural language a kind of hybrid modernism. Many of these cinemas have been maintained in their original state. However, in the big cities, the process of converting them into multiplexes has already begun. Haubitz + Zoche's photographs from the period 2010 - 2013 document a piece of cinema culture that has already for the most part disappeared in Europe and the USA and is being increasingly displaced in India by commercial interests.

Markus Draper finds visual metaphors for the late-period GDR in his own family history. His father was a prominent city planner in Görlitz in the 1980s and his diaries, which were laid out in tabular form, have been translated into painting by the artist. The title Inge Goes to Work on Foot comes from notes in these diaries and describes the feeling of complete stagnation that dominated the last decade of the GDR. During that period, former members of the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction (RAF) went to ground in the tower-block developments on the fringes of the city and Draper has cast metal models of these prefab highrises. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the Kulturhistorisches Museum Görlitz and includes essays by Clemens Klöckner and others, an interview with former RAF member Ralf B. Friedrich, and a discussion between Jennifer Allen and Markus Draper.

On 20 November 1969, Heinrich Riebesehl (born 1938) visited the premises of the Neue Hannoversche Presse, where he photographed people in the elevator using a more or less concealed camera for five hours and 35 minutes.

"For some time now the cinema auditorium has given me sleepless nights," writes film-maker Clemens von Wedemeyer. "What would it be like if the walls in a multiplex cinema were to vanish and you were free to shift your gaze so that your eyes could wander over to the next screen. Or the inside became the outside and the walls of the cinema disappeared." In his installations the screen becomes not only a projection surface but also a membrane, the seam between the performance and the locations where it was shot. The film's intervention makes historical and political narratives become visible in these locations as zones of conflict, for instance, in prisons, on borders, or in the museum.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has developed its own image culture, with public space serving primarily as a transit zone and a screen where state-sanctioned religious ideology is projected. Pride of place is given to memorials to the first Gulf war (the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88), which is part of the founding myth of the Islamic Republic. Between 2011 and 2014 Oliver Hartung produced a work on Iran, typological series of images depicting monuments, murals, architecture, and war cemeteries. In it he creates a portrait of an exceptionally photogenic country that is nevertheless largely unknown in the West: in Damghan a colossal ear of wheat acts as a street lamp and in Isfahan a hand grenade with an Internet symbol suggests the potential risks inherent in the world wide web. The names of the places where the photos were taken are provided in English.

Christoph Weber's book project takes a close look at the development of his art practice from methodological reenactment (Nachvollzug) to his engagement with concrete. Jens Kastner takes a work about the Paris Commune, Untitled (Ramponeau), as the starting point for an analysis of the complications of sculptural and political art, while philosopher Sadie Plant delves into concrete's very own cultural and material universe. Weber and fellow artist Andreas Duscha have developed an installation especially for this publication -- akin to a Muybridge set-up, it shows movement in single frames, using pinhole cameras with exposure times related to concrete's curing times. A text by Andreas Duscha explores the analogies between Weber's most recent manipulations of uncured concrete and lowtech photography.

How can songs reflect political events? How does a song become a political song? The artist Olaf Nicolai invited eleven international composers to write songs that reference political events which were of current relevance to them. Without prior announcement, a total of 58 songs were performed as a-cappella pieces on twelve Sundays in 2011 on the central staircase of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Visitors to the museum found themselves as actors in a staged performance for brief instances of time. The publication Escalier du Chant presents excerpts from the songs and commentaries by the composers in the form of 58 music sheets; the accompanying booklet contains various photographs of the performances. Includes songs by Tony Conrad, Georg Friedrich Haas, Georg Katzer, Liza Lim, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Enno Poppe with Marcel Beyer, Rolf Riehm, James Saunders, Elliott Sharp, Mika Vainio, Jennifer Walshe.