The Weimar File

‘The Weimar File’ is a previously unpublished work by visual artist Vik Muniz, best known for remaking famous artworks in materials other than paint and then photographing them. Having once been personally investigated by the Department of Homeland Security in New York, Muniz used the incident as inspiration for a series of hundreds of photos he made in Weimar, Germany. Perceived through a sheen of fear and suspicion, the images seemingly yearn for a balance between the banal and the spectacular, the deadly serious and the absurd. Fragments of visual evidence, they raise questions of what new meanings such images take on when they are removed from their context.