Vik Muniz Forbidden City (Postcards from Nowhere), 2014 Digital c-print 180.3 x 256.8 cm 71 x 101 1/8 inches Edition of 6 + 4 AP This new work from Vik Muniz’s series, Postcards from Nowhere, will be unveiled for the first time in public at Art Basel Hong Kong 2015. The series features large-scale colour photographs based on iconic landmarks and travel destinations around the world; Forbidden City is Muniz’s view of the celebrated Palace Museum in Beijing. Muniz creates these images using scraps of postcards, which once collaged together suggest a tactile, impastoed surface. The thick format of the vintage photographs collaged together, coupled with the studio lighting used to photograph them, result in a three-dimensional quality in these monumental photographs. Muniz is interested in the history of sending and collecting postcards as a recollection of one’s travels and a form of communication, which has since been replaced by the instantaneous nature of modern technology. The works offer a meditation on the personal versus the collective, the precious versus the ephemeral, nostalgia and modernity.
