Since the late 2000s, German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi has been creating works at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and photography. Her large-scale installations question the history and memory of places, exploring the connections between time and space in a transnational perspective and have gained her wide international recognition and praise.

This book features Pousttchi's new photographic installation at Nivola Museum in Orani on the Italian island Sardinia. For this, she chose as her subject the Metropolitan Life Building on 1 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Criticised for its blatant Italian references at the time of its completion in 1909 and the world's tallest high-rise until 1913, the building displays a hybrid identity, recalling cultural and temporal-spatial dislocations between the Old and the New World, Renaissance and Modernism.

Published alongside the images of Metropolitan Life and other works by Pousttchi are an essay by art historian Greg Foster-Rice and a conversation between the artist, critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and architect and writer Markus Miessen.