The Distance Narrows, 2010, sample copies, unpublished book project in collaboration with Hannes Schmidt

The Distance Narrows (2010/11) is an artist publication by Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton and Hannes Schmidt on the abandoned Iraqi embassy in former East Berlin.
The Iraqi embassy was built in the early 1970s and shut down with the German reunification. When the Iraqi officials left in the early 1990s documents, books and furniture remained in the building and can still be found on site today. For The Distance Narrows the artists collected and rearranged this left-behind material into collages and combined them with a series of photographs they developed at the embassy. The Distance Narrows forms a subjective portrait of this historically dense site where the two vanished socialist systems GDR and Ba´athist Iraq overlap. A first version of the publication was presented in Berlin and as part of The Bidoun Library exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Cover image The Distance Narrows

Pages from The Distance Narrows

Project presentation The Distance Narrows, 2010, basso, Berlin

Project presentation The Distance Narrows
Exhibition view, The Bidoun Library, 2011, Serpentine Gallery, London