Up and Coming: Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design 2024

DEUTSCH

Up and Coming: Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design 2024
Anja Dietmann & Jonas Beuchert
Elfi Handina Murandu
Johanna Behrens

July 11 - August 17, 2024 

Vernissage⎢Thu. July 11, 18 - 21 hr 
Opening Times ⎢Thu. + Fri. 11 – 18 hr⁠ / Sat. 11 – 15 Uhr⁠ und nach Vereinbarung

In cooperation with Stiftung Buchkunst 

einBuch.haus and Stiftung Buchkunst (German foundation for book design) continue their cooperation with the presentation of the 2024 “Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design”.

The designers Anja Dietmann together with Jonas Beuchert, Elfi Handina Murandu and Johanna Behrens, who were awarded the 2024 Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design, will be honoured with an exhibition. On display are the three award-winning publications, but also their translation into space: publication plots as wall installations, audio impressions of the conversations addressed in the book project as well as dialogues transformed into a performance and a piece of furniture. Complemented by prints, small editions, and the shortlist for this year's Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design. Each of the three publication projects operates with a conscious reproduction, repetition and thus staging of structural grievances, which manifests in the form of printed and bound statements and in this way raise questions that invite dialogue.

Anja Dietmann
Umsatzübersicht Publisher: Edition Taube

Elfi Handina Murandu
A Book about Hair Publisher: Lucia Verlag

Johanna Behrens
Wölfinnen
Buch für Zwei

Umsatzübersicht // Anja Dietmann Design: Jonas Beuchert, Publisher: Edition Taube
Can financial economics function as a circular system? This book attempts to answer that question via an artistic self-experiment. Attaching monetary value to her own housework, the author employs herself as a domestic help on minimum wage. The result is a whole year of bank statements showing almost daily transfers, a kind of annual report for the artist’s personal asset-transfer project.

It may be just illustrating a point, but her closed-loop microeconomy produces a rather strange kind of value chain, one that gets you thinking about concepts such as unpaid labour, market gaps, ad hoc work, outsourcing and self-exploitation. This book could be said to embody all those aspects. After all, the project’s aim was to raise the funds to produce it, which means the whole thing has come full circle – although, if it only has two points, is it still a circle?

Anja Dietmann studied fine arts at HFBK Hamburg, in 2013 she completed her studies with a diploma. Her artistic practice is one that crosses borders, in which disciplines like performance, music, sculpture and publishing are stagged collaboratively. Through her observations in the everyday life, she generates works that escape the familiar and consult society in a bizarre way.

A Book about Hair // Elfi Handina Murandu Publisher: Lucia Verlag
What the title of this book doesn’t mention is that it’s about the hair of people classified as black. The associations of “black hair” – it’s stubborn, unruly, uneven, frizzy, has a life of its own – often play a particularly important role in their identity.

These associations are fundamental to the dust jacket design. Its title lines are pushed together to form a compact typographical vignette, from which irregular wavy lines protrude. Heavily enlarged braided locks wind their way across the jacket, forming delicate strands and abstract solids. The jacket can also be opened out to create a poster that introduces the 30 contributors. Inside, they talk about their own hair-related experiences – not just in terms of care regimes or styles, but also in terms of everyday interactions.

Wölfinnen, Buch für Zwei // Johanna Behrens
This chamber piece is about passive and active interactions between women and men, the questionable allocation of gender roles, and what might happen if time-honoured practices were turned on their head. By not specifying the dramatis personae, the playwright affords the director a great deal of freedom. This enabled the book designer to present the play’s originally polyphonic lines as a two-handed dialogue. To do so, she thought long and hard about a book’s basic properties and came up with dual binding, meaning the book is bidirectional; the pages open alternately to the left and right, thus providing a tangible, physical translation of the bipolar subject matter.

Johanna Behrens (*1998) has been studying communication design at Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel since October 2020. Her work is focused on the interface of encounter and interaction with design of texts with focus on typography and book design. In her works she studies how a thought-out concept in combination with not always conventional materials and shapes can cause a special reaction with the observer. With her design she wants to create new impulses and deepen the understanding of the interdependence between print products and their observers.

Interview on Muthesius Kunsthochshule 

Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design

The competition Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design aims to detect inventive ideas on printed publications or hybrid book forms, and thus developments in the field of editorial design: An attempt to create visibility for impulses of tomorrow as well as quality concepts of today. This design competition for the up- and coming does not focus on technical perfection but on conception. Endowed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, awarded since 1989.

Stiftung Buchkunst

Stiftung Buchkunst awards »The Best German Book Design« of a year, offers a platform for rethinking the medium of the book with »Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design«, and networks international book design competitions under the umbrella of »Best Book Design from all over the World«. Stiftung Buchkunst (German foundation for book design) has been a recognised foundation under civil law since 1966. It´s founded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, the German National Library, the City of Frankfurt/Main and the City of Leipzig.

PRESS RELEASE

Exhibition View: Up and Coming: Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design 2024, einBuch.haus, 2024 (Photo: Hyemi Cho)