Spector Books @ bruno (Olaf Nicolai and Tobias Zielony book signing)

08.05.2015
Spector Books @ bruno (Olaf Nicolai and Tobias Zielony book signing)

A special evening with Spector Books, Olaf Nicolai, and Tobias Zielony in unison with the vernissage of the 56th Edition of the Venice Art Biennale. The artists will be present for the book signing.

About the books presented:

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Olaf Nicolai, Heidi Specker: Le pigment de la lumière
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.
Olaf Nicolai (*1962 in Halle / Saale, Germany) professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
Heidi Specker (*1962 in Damme, Germany) professor at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.

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Olaf Nicolai: Escalier du Chant
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. Including 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.

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Olaf Nicolai: Noms de Guerres
"Noms de Guerres" was created as a textual piece in 36 parts. The verbal material for this series of poems derives from a study of post-1945 military campaigns and consists exclusively of the codenames employed for specific campaigns. Brief explanatory notes on each of the designated operations can be found in the final section of the book.

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Tobias Zielony: Trona. Armpit of America
»Berlin-based photographer Tobias Zielony has visited the small, ramshackle Californian chemistry city because it is ›possibly the worst place in America, if not the world‹, to quote a blog; his pictures show a small town entirely in the grasp of producers, dealers and consumers of a crystalline drug that keeps people on their toes for days and lets them age decades in the course of a mere few months. Chemists call it methamphetamine, addicts call it ›crystal‹, or ›meth‹, or both; politicians call it the new American pandemic.« Peter Richter in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

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Tobias Zielony: VELE
“Le Vele di Scampia” is a futuristic housing estate in northern Naples and a Camorra battlefield. Conceived by Francesco di Salvo in the late seventies and widely recognised for their urbanistic, “Le Vele” (The Sails) were squatted by mafia families even before completion. Today the building complex is a symbol of the Camorra’s power in the Naples region and a key centre of European drug trafficking. Matteo Garrone shot his movie “Gomorra” based on the Novel by Roberto Saviano on the site in 2008. Tobias Zielony’s film “Le Vele di Scampia” from 2009 originates in this very place. Seven thousand single images, shot at night with a digital single-lens reflex camera, are used to create nine minutes of animation film. The book “Vele” is based on this animation film with a selection of 287 single images.

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Tobias Zielony: Jenny, Jenny
Tobias Zielony’s recent photo series started with a chance encounter. A conversation with a young couple on a Berlin subway train led Zielony to suggest to photograph them. At the next stop they took a few quick shots on the platform. She told him that she could always be found around here, and he could come back anytime to take more pictures. “Here?” — “I walk the street, right around the corner!” They meet again, Zielony first portrays her and then also her fellow prostitutes and friends. The result is the 40 part series “Jenny Jenny”. It is not documentary: Tobias Zielony avoids the journalistic impetus for certainty and truth. To him, the authenticity of the subject is as relevant as the question of the objectivity of the documentary image: both are never free of dramatic elements. The book is published on occasion of the exhibition “Tobias Zielony: Jenny Jenny” in the Berlinischen Galerie.


Spector Books publishes books in the intersection of art, design and theory.
www.spectorbooks.com