Monday 12 February 2018

Taryn Simon - Artist Research


Taryn Simon 



Simon’s art often uncovers the unexpected effects of geopolitical forces and large-scale policies on the lives of individuals as well as the fates of the communities they form. An early series, The Innocents (2003), which stemmed from a 2000 assignment from the New York Times, catalogued the individual histories of people who had been exonerated of crimes through the use of DNA evidence. Fuelled by her realisation that photography as a medium had often contributed to her subjects’ faulty convictions, whether as a component of police lineups or prosecutors’ cases, Simon documented her subjects at sites significant to their histories, such as the locations of their arrests or of eyewitness mis-identifications. The project was also published as a book, as was a subsequent project, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007). Among the many sites and objects Simon photographed for the latter series were a nuclear waste storage facility, a copy of Playboy in braille, and a vial of live HIV; these subjects were selected for both their inaccessibility to most Americans and their centrality to American narratives and myths. - guggenhiem 

                                                                                                                                                         

This week, an exhibition of new work entitled A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters opens at Tate Modern, a rare accolade for a photographer who is just 36 years old. It is an investigation into the nature of genealogy and its consequences and is her most complex, ambitious and laborious project yet. It comprises a series of 18 family bloodlines, each with a strange or arresting individual story at its heart: an Iraqi man who was apparently employed as Saddam Hussein's son's body double; a member of the Druze religious sect in Lebanon who believes in reincarnation and re-enacts remembered scenes from previous lives; a living Indian man who gives the project its title, having been declared dead in official records.
"It is a complex and multilayered exhibition, but also direct and engaging," says Simon Baker, Tate Modern's curator of photography. "There are a small number of photographers who combine the visual and the textual so powerfully, and whose work is sophisticated in terms of contemporary art practice but also hard-wired to the real world. Taryn is certainly one of them. In one way, walking into the exhibition is like entering an incredible book."


  

Taryn Simon, Thirty-year natural gas contract between Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation, Shanghai, China, May 21, 2014, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, 2015, archival inkjet print in mahogany frames with text in windowed compartment on archival herbarium paper, 85 × 73 1/4 × 2 3/4 inches framed (215.9 × 186.1 × 7 cm) © Taryn Simon.


Reflection


 Taking objects and displaying them within a different context, Taryn Simon takes the mundane object an transports its narrative until another setting. These Flowers pictured above, are taken from government meetings, alone they seem innocent enough. However,  acting as a representation of that discussion that take on a more ominous reading. What I love about these works are how unoffensive and passive they appear and first glance, the concept allows you to re-imagine the work with a different narrative. Simon's work documents stories that often would be overlooked, the contrast between clear cut photographs and texts and  a deep multi-layer exhibition creates a balance that is challenging yet engaging.


                                                                                                                                                

Sources




Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)