The Scottish artist Susan Philipsz (b. Glasgow, 1965; lives and works in Berlin) creates works that revolve around memory, melancholy, and loss. For roughly the past two decades, she has dedicated herself to rearranging both musical and literary sources as well as their historical references. The artist often reuses familiar sequences from bands like Nirvana, Radiohead, and the Velvet Underground or works with Irish and Scottish ballads, folksongs, and classical compositions, which she deftly translates into site-specific sound installations. In 2010, she won the Turner Prize.
In the project War Damaged Musical Instruments, Philipsz develops a visual and auditory archive of such instruments from the collections of museums in the United Kingdom and Germany: a flugelhorn riddled with bullet holes; a cavalry bugle salvaged from the wreck of the British freighter SS Pomeranian, which was sunk by a German U-boat in 1918; a clarinet destroyed by shrapnel; and a German tuba, a trophy captured in trench warfare. The book contains photographs of the instruments as well as wide-ranging contextual information on the individual sounds. Historic materials, maps, photographs, and written reports shed light on the events during which the instruments suffered damage. With an essay by Jasper Sharp. An audio guide integrated into the book enhances the visual research with the artist’s extraordinary sound compositions.