art, tech, culture & crisis... Books to bring from 2021 to 2022
HELLO FUTURE
Hello Future is a culmination of Al Qasimi’s photographic, performance and film practice, unified within her keen focus on surface and texture, and the revealing visual influences of the splashy and florid. Farah is a bright and rising multidisciplinary artist whose work examines postcolonial structures of power, gender and aesthetic in the Persian Gulf states and global cultural confluence and migration at-large. The monograph includes an essay by Negar Azimi and conversation between Al Qasimi and artist Meriem Bennani.
Farah Al Qasimi (b.1991, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; lives in Brooklyn and Dubai) works in photography, video, and performance.
Shortlisted for Aperture-Paris Photo Photobook of the Year 2021
FREE
Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope. Then, in December 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything changed.
Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history.
KLARA AND THE SUN
Klara and the Sun is the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017
From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.
In Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
Always Crashing in the Same Car
On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment.
Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It’s a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author’s own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT MONEY
In this unforgettable blend of memoir and cultural commentary, Otegha Uwagba explores her own complicated relationship with money, and what her wide-ranging experiences say about the world around us.
An extraordinarily candid personal account of the ups and downs wrought by money, We Need To Talk About Money is a vital exploration of stories and issues that will be familiar to most. This is a book about toxic workplaces and misogynist men, about getting payrises and getting evicted. About class and privilege and racism and beauty. About shame and pride, compulsion and fear.
In unpicking the shroud of secrecy surrounding money – who has it, how they got it, and how it shapes our lives – this boldly honest account of one woman’s journey upturns countless social conventions, and uncovers some startling truths about our complex relationships with money in the process.
YOU ARE HERE
A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape
Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.
Phillips and Milner describe how our poisoned media landscape came into being, beginning with the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s—which, they say, exemplify “network climate change”—and proceeding through the emergence of trolling culture and the rise of the reactionary far right (as well as its amplification by journalists) during and after the 2016 election. They explore the history of conspiracy theories in the United States, focusing on those concerning the Deep State; explain why old media literacy solutions fail to solve new media literacy problems; and suggest how we can navigate the network crisis more thoughtfully, effectively, and ethically. We need a network ethics that looks beyond the messages and the messengers to investigate toxic information's downstream effects.
Han hun hen
Af Cecilie Nørgaard
Samtalerne om feminisme og ligestilling er ikke nået ret langt ind på børneværelserne i Danmark. Her foregår tingene langt hen ad vejen på samme måde, som de har gjort i generationer. De fleste børn vokser stadig op i to adskilte universer: det lyseblå eller det lyserøde. Det er synd, for når børn primært bliver præsenteret for de muligheder og forventninger, der er til netop deres køn, går de - og resten af samfundet - glip af alle de nuancer i deres personligheder, som de kunne have udviklet.
Men det er ikke så let som voksen at opdrage børn frit og lige, for de stereotype kønsroller stikker dybt i vores kultur og egen barndom, og det er det, vi instinktivt trækker på, når vi omgås børn. Bogen her hjælper alle voksne med at få øjnene op for deres egne fordomme og begrænsende adfærd og giver 10 konkrete bud på normkritisk opdragelse.
Kvinde kend din historie
Af Gry Jexen
Kvinde Kend Din Historie er en bog til alle, der vil vide mere om kvinder i danmarkshistorien og blive klogere på sig selv. Jo mere vi kan spejle os i fortiden, jo bedre kan vi forstå vores nutid, og samtidig klæder viden os på til at skabe det liv og den fremtid, vi ønsker for os selv og vores børn.
I Kvinde Kend Din Historie portrætteres 50 kvinder, der har levet i Danmark i løbet af de seneste 500 år.
Bogens forfatter, Gry Jexen, er historiker, driver profilen Kvinde Kend Din Historie på Instagram og podcasten med samme navn, der netop har fået Podcastprisen 2020 for Årets Nørderi.
DAMASKUS
Af Iben Albinus
Sigrid udstationeres i Damaskus for en skandinavisk telegigant i håb om at hjælpe demokratiet på vej i Syrien og efterlader mand og barn i Danmark. Året er 2011, og det arabiske forår spirer. Da regimet tager brutale midler i brug for at slå oprøret ned, siger Sigrid ja til en ikke ufarlig opgave for den danske efterretningstjeneste.
I Syrien møder Sigrid samtidig ungdomsveninden Reem, efter en dramatisk begivenhed skilte dem ad i studieårene i København. Nu genforenes de endelig i Damaskus, hvor jasmintræerne blomstrer om kap med håbet om politiske reformer. Men Reem viser sig at stå på den modsatte side i konflikten. Hun leder et sikkerhedsfirma og har tætte bånd til regeringen.
Mens Sigrid prøver at gøre det rigtige, fører hun både sig selv og dem, hun elsker, ind i en livsfarlig konspiration og må spørge sig selv: Hvem er ven, og hvem er fjende?
Damaskus er en spændingsroman om venskab og forræderi, om kærlighed og krigsforbrydelser og om, hvor forbandet svært det er at være et godt menneske i mødet med ondskab.
BERØRT
Om dansk kunst i det nye årtusinde
Af Maria Kjær Themsen
Kunsten berører os. Nogle gange som et strejf, en tanke, andre gange som en decideret rystelse – fra spektakulære installationer med spejle og højteknologi til håndgjorte værker, der inkluderer bivoks, mug, hår og plantedele.
Maria Kjær Themsen (f. 1978) giver et indblik i de seneste to årtiers kunstneriske nybrud og beskriver, hvordan kunsten afspejler de aktuelle samtaler om dét at være menneske. Kunstværkerne spiller hovedrollen i bogen, der er illustreret med 400 meget forskellige værker af såvel periodens mest profilerede kunstnere som en lang række unge, mindre kendte navne.
Maria Kjær Themsen er kunstredaktør ved Dagbladet Information. Hun er blandt andet kurator, forfatter til monografien John Kørner / Maleri (2016) og tidligere kunstkritiker ved Weekendavisen.