Inside Embassies

Inside Embassies presents Elisabeth Ida Mulyani's photographs of meeting rooms, waiting areas, and anonymous corridors inside a dozen embassies around the world. Working in a restrained, objective style, Mulyani examines the embassy as a physical stand-in for a nation abroad, a site meant to embody transnational relations and diplomacy, and, just as often, an ordinary workplace of drab offices and mismatched furnishings under the watchful gaze of a state portrait. The photographs register the small, deliberate gestures architecture and interior design make toward national identity and hospitality, gestures that read as gauche as often as they read as elegant. Published by Art Paper Editions (Ghent, Belgium) in 2015 as a first edition of 500 softcover copies, the book was Mulyani's first monograph, following her training in fine art photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium.