My works continually mutate under different politics, economies, cultures and times. . . . These disruptions and time’s passage are part of the work.
—Taryn Simon
Gagosian is pleased to present Portraits and Surrogates, Taryn Simon’s first exhibition in Hong Kong. Simon draws from three key bodies of recent work, as well as a video self-portrait made in collaboration with a Russian news program, to examine the reciprocity between portraits and their surrogates. The technical, physical, and aesthetic realization of Simon’s projects often reflects the control and authority that form the grist of her work.
Simon is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose work has been the subject of many museum exhibitions around the world since her prescient debut with The Innocents in 2002 at MoMA PS1, New York. In 2013, her ambitious taxonomic series A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–11) was presented at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Simon’s research-driven approach has produced other such impactful series as An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007); Contraband (2010); and the web-based Image Atlas (2012); as well as The Picture Collection (2013); Birds of the West Indies (2013–14); Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015); and Black Square (2006–), an ongoing project about the consequences of human inventions. For Simon, photography has always been a vehicle for larger conceptual ideas. Paired with text, her photographs reveal the structures behind controlling systems, from ancestry and borders to botany and diplomacy. Between text and image, a blur occurs and each is altered by the other, again and again, back and forth.
Portraits and Surrogates suggests the transformative power of the subject and its photograph, examining how even the most banal object becomes freighted with new significance when exposed to different cultural and political circumstances. Contraband (2010) is an archive of desire and control, comprising 1,075 photographs taken at the US Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the US Postal Service International Mail Facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. With performative intent, Simon lived a full working week at the airport without pause, photographing the flow of generic goods seized from passengers and express mail entering the United States from abroad—from fashion items and foodstuffs to exotic creatures and pirate videos.
