Beastly / Tierisch. Duncan Forbes & Daniela Jansen (Eds.). Spector Books

Posted in Exhibition catalogue, photography on July 16th, 2015
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beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_01  beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_09beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_08beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_07beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_06beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_05beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_04beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_03beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_02beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_10beastly_tierisch_Duncan_Forbes_Daniela_Jansen_spector_books_motto_distribution_10Representations of animals are ubiquitous: from advertising hoardings, newspapers, books, magazines, and television shows, to the hundreds of thousands of images uploaded every day to the Internet. During the last twenty years, artists, too, have engaged with the animal in an effort to articulate more “beastly” visions. How can animals as autonomous creative entities take possession of an unshackled imaginative space cut loose from the human? Beastly/ Tierisch has an innovative, visually daring design, superimposing a selection of artistic works onto a host of pictures from the Internet. This rich image material is supplemented by four essays: about animality and the history of photography (Duncan Forbes), the political and philosophical animal (Slavoj Žižek), the virtual zoo of the Internet (Ana Teixeira Pinto), and the changing identities of animals under anthropogenic pressures (Heather Davis).

€28.00

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En Passant 1986-1990. Manfred Paul. Spector Books

Posted in men, photography on July 14th, 2015
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Hardcover with dust jacket

€36.00

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trail. Natascha Sadr Haghighian. Spector Books

Posted in writing on July 8th, 2015
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With contributions from Michael Boßdorf, Herr Düsterdieck, Anselm Franke, Avery Gordon, Ayse Güle, Reza Haeri, Tom Keenan, Volker Lange,Helmut Weich, Allen S. Weiss

Co-published with the documenta archiv.

Design: Ça ira !
Editors: Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Pola Sieverding, Jasper Kettner

»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.

€28.00

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Black Mountain. Eugen Blume, Matilda Felix, Gabriele Knapstein, Catherine Nichols (ed.). Spector Books

Posted in history, Theory, writing on June 18th, 2015
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The Black Mountain College (BMC), founded in 1933 in North Carolina, is considered by its multidisciplinary and experimental education thought as one of the most innovative schools in the first half of the 20th century. Visual arts, economics, physics, dance, architecture and music were taught here on an equal footing; Teachers and students lived together in a democratically organized community. The first rector of the school was John Andrew Rice, among many other gifts here Josef Albers, John Cage, Walter Gropius and Buckminster Fuller courses. At BMC, many avant-garde concepts were developed. The image-rich band appears on the exhibition Black Mountain. He is the first comprehensive publication on the Black Mountain College in the German-speaking countries and traces the history of this legendary school in its basic features after.

Eugen Blume, Matilda Felix, Gabriele Knapstein, Catherine Nichols (ed.)

Language: German

€34.00

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Matthias Hamann: You Would. Spector Books

Posted in men, photography on June 16th, 2015
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The title of Matthias Hamann’s new photo book is taken from a piece of graffiti found on a wheelie 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.

Matthias Hamann (*1974 in Leisnig, Germany) studied photography under Timm Rautert and Christopher Muller at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. In 2012 he spent six months in New York on a scholarship from the Free State of Saxony.

ca. 128 pages, 110 Colour plates, staple bound
Edition of 750
€28.00

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Acts of Voicing. Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Christine Peters (Ed.). Spector Books

Posted in Exhibition catalogue on May 28th, 2015
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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.

€36.00

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Grit. Grit Hachmeister. Spector Books

Posted in photography on April 21st, 2015
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There are certain images that provoke us. Take, for example, the photograph of Jane Birkin, in which she stands leaning casually against a door with a cigarette in one hand and the other in her trousers – a detail that you don’t see at first glance. A groundbreaking image that was seen in the 1970s as an act of female self-emancipation. Grit Hachmeister copied the pose in 2007 and its effect is just as startling as the original. The artist has a series of such pictures in her oeuvre: people dressed in nothing but a pair of shoes engaged in various sexual practices. There’s plenty of fumbling around and coupling here – being human is a messy business. Hachmeister now presents her first monograph, a collection of drawings, self-portraits, visual narratives, and staged photographs that were produced over the last ten years and provide a showcase for the artist’s humorous, gender-critical work.

Grit Hachmeister (*1979 in Leipzig, Germany), lives and works in Berlin.

German/English, 33 b&w Illustrations and 135 colour illustrations

€32.00

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Script of Demolition. Alina Schmuch. Spector Books

Posted in Uncategorized on April 21st, 2015
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Often there are only seconds between the ignition of a blasting charge and the collapse of a building, but the planning for such a demolition can take weeks. Blasting is a profession that relies on experience, and that is conveyed through the medium of the image. The blaster, before he destroys the building, makes a complex technical drawing of the progression. The detonation itself is then recorded by several cameras from different view points. Afterwards the drawings are superposed over the photographs in order to control the blast. A permanent calibration, an optimization between the idea and the reality by the means of drawing and photography. In her artistic work, Alina Schmuch also mostly uses the medium of photography. For the project Script of Demolition she worked with the extensive image archive of the blaster family Fink. The publication includes different imaging media — from 8mm film to digital photography. The book presents movement sequences of collapsing chimneys, TV towers and buildings that have been recorded following explicitly nonaesthetic criteria.

German and English, including numerous drawings
Gestaltung: Jan Kiesswetter
Heike Schuppelius, Armin Linke (Hrsg.)
Leipzig 2014
36.00 €

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Modern Monsters – Death and Life of Fiction. Anselm Franke, Brian Kuan Wood (Eds.). Spector Books

Posted in writing on April 1st, 2015
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David Der-Wei Wang, Nabil Ahmed, Chen Chieh-Jen, Reza Negarestani, Jow Jiun Gong, Joachim Koester, James T. Hong, Jei Li, Bavand Behpoor, Sophie Wahnich, Ian Svenonius, Eric Baudelaire, Masao Matsuda, Mark Fisher, Alberto Toscano, Hu Fang, Chihiro Minato, Natasha Ginwala

Departing from the figure of the Taowu, a Chinese mythological monster of evil inclination used recently by histo- rians 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.

ca. 300 pp., 18 x 26 cm, English, 100 black-white illustrations, thread-sewn softcover

Design: ZAK Group, London
Editors: Brian Kuan Wood for Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Anselm Franke, curator of the Taipei Biennial

Price: €24.00

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Amok. André Gelpke. Spector Books. CPress

Posted in photography on March 12th, 2015
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Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution1 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution2 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution3 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution4 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution5 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution6 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution7 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution9 Amok_Andre_Gelpke_Spector_Books_Motto_Distribution10Amok 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.

216 pages, 20 x 27 cm, German/English, Linen hardcover, published by Spector Books and co-published with cpress, Zurich
Design: Christof Nüssli
Editors: André Gelpke, Christof Nüssli
Leipzig 2014
ISBN: 978-3-944669-81-6

 

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