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 1990s 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.

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter — to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art — but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or “research” art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider “an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions,” and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each “a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going.” In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians — among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.