Stefan Berg and Peter Sealy talk about the reconsideration of the bauhaus building in Dessau and the creation of the book "bauhaus – gesehen von / seen by Stefan Berg".
The book is a collaboration between photographer Stefan Berg and curator Harald Theiss for the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus.
Through a contemporary visual language detached from the commonly known culture-historical and architectural discourse, the model of “bauhaus thinking” should become visible here. Berg’s goal is to present its ideas pictorially: to illustrate the modernization and composition of a society, but also to make it palpable.
With a present-day and concentrated photographic gaze, Berg investigates whether and how the idea of the bauhaus manifests itself in the exemplary Dessau building and how, as Gropius once said, art and technology can be regarded as a new single entity.
The book is an obstacle course in which viewers encounter subjects like light, proportion, surface, space and materiality in constituent chapters. The chosen motifs emphasize these subjects through their compositional juxtaposition. They encourage viewers to confront the question, “What is the bauhaus, actually?” and potentially discover something new. (Text: Harald Theiss - the book was created as a joint project with the Berlin curator).
The
Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) will be present at the event, with copies of Stefan Berg's book for sale (for about 52$).
About Stefan Berg
Stefan Berg
| © Liesa Fuchs
Stefan Berg (born 1971 in Bielefeld, lives and works in Berlin) has worked as a lecturer in photography at the University of Applied Sciences Anhalt in Dessau and finished in this time his long term project with shots of the facade and the interior of the building. Above all, his photographic interest was to make the building graphically and creatively visible and thus to make Bauhaus's idea tangible. Berg's pictures show how the external asymmetry of the cubic-shaped structures becomes symmetrical once inside and how the outer space and inner space merge with each other as through the penetration of light. He manages to arouse the viewer's moods and to convey an aesthetic experience to him.
About Peter Sealy
Peter Sealy
| © Peter Sealy
Peter Sealy is assistant professor at the University of Toronto and an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. He holds architecture degrees from the McGill University School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was a Frank Knox fellow. He recently completed his PhD at Harvard on the emergence of a photographic visual regime in nineteenth-century architectural publications, seen through the lens of truth — in both architecture and its representations.
Current research projects include a study of the Berlin Wall in film, and a forthcoming article on the iterative nature of re-mediated design practices.
About the book
bauhaus – gesehen von / seen by Stefan Berg
German / English
© Distanz Verlag
16,5 x 24 cm
128 pages, 90 b/w images
Hardcover
ISBN 978-3-95476-231-6
Release: September 2018
€ 25,00 (D) / £ 23,00 / $ 40,00
www.distanz.de
With texts from Wiebke Loeper and Harald Theiss.
The book is a collaboration between photographer Stefan Berg and curator Harald Theiss for the 100th anniversary of the bauhaus.
For more information about the book click here.
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