Selected Correspondences 2001-2010

In 2001, Walead Beshty began documenting the Diplomatic Mission of the Republic of Iraq to the former German Democratic Republic in Berlin. Still protected as sovereign territory under the Vienna Conventions, the embassy has stood abandoned since the early 1990’s as, in Beshty’s words, "a relic of two bygone regimes, unclaimable by any nation; a physical location marooned (by) symbolic shifts in global politics, a ruin set apart neitherby fences nor by millennia, but by the invisible and abstract mechanisms of international law". The site inspired his ongoing engagement with the invisible and marginal territories of globalization which provide an important line through his photographic and sculptural work of the past decade. Selected Correspondences focuses on three bodies of photographic work – two that deal with the Embassy directly and a third, Transparencies, which continues the question of place and movement. The work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Tate Britain, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others, and is brought together here for the first time, accompanied by two new essays on the projects.