About
Archives exist because there’s something that can’t necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information.
—Taryn Simon
Taryn Simon directs our attention to familiar systems of organization—bloodlines, criminal investigations, flower arrangements—making visible the contours of power and authority hidden within. Incorporating mediums ranging from photography and sculpture to text, sound, and performance, each of her projects is shaped by years of rigorous research and planning, including obtaining access from institutions as varied as the US Department of Homeland Security and Playboy Enterprises, Inc.
Born in New York, where she lives and works, Simon received a BA in semiotics from Brown University in 1997. In 2001 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for what would become her first major photographic and textual work: The Innocents (2002), which was exhibited at MoMA PS 1. Documenting cases of wrongful conviction in the United States, The Innocents calls into question photography’s function as a credible eyewitness and arbiter of justice.
In 2007 Simon’s series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The photographs depict objects, sites, and spaces that are integral to America’s foundation, mythology, and daily functioning, but that remain inaccessible or unknown. These subjects include radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility, a black bear in hibernation, and the art collection of the CIA. The following year Simon began A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2011), for which she traveled the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the work’s eighteen “chapters,” the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, and religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the “living dead” in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. For Contraband (2010), Simon spent a week at JFK International Airport in New York, photographing the goods that were seized as they entered the US from abroad. An archive of global desires and perceived threats, Contraband encompasses 1,075 images of items set against crisp pale gray backgrounds. A formal inverse of these works can be found in Black Square (2006–), in which Simon isolates objects, documents, and individuals within a black field with precisely the same measurements as Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 Suprematist work of the same name.
In 2012–13 Simon began work on Image Atlas (2012–) and The Picture Collection (2013–), projects that bridge physical and digital archives. The former, created with computer programmer Aaron Swartz, investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local search engines throughout the world. The latter was inspired by the New York Public Library’s picture archive, whose 1.2 million printed images, organized under more than 12,000 subject headings, comprise the largest circulating picture library in the world. In 2013 Simon also produced Birds of the West Indies, a two-part series that takes its title from a taxonomy by American ornithologist James Bond. Part I is a visual inventory of the women, weapons, and vehicles appearing in the film franchise featuring the fictional British spy James Bond; this visual database of interchangeable variables used in the production of fantasy examines the economic and emotional value generated by their repetition. In Part II, Simon identifies, photographs, and classifies every bird that appears in the first twenty-four James Bond films. Simon pored over every scene to discover these moments of chance, training her eye away from the agents of seduction—glamour, luxury, power, violence, sex—to look only in the margins.
In Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015), Simon re-created centerpieces from official photographs of international political signings, underscoring how the stagecraft of power is created, performed, marketed, and maintained. The signings that inform the series involve the countries that were present at the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which addressed the globalization of economies after World War II and led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The concrete flower presses comprising the series’ sculptural component were included in the 2015 Venice Biennale. The following year Simon presented her first performance work, An Occupation of Loss (2016), in which professional mourners enact rituals of grief, broadcasting their lamentations from within a sculptural installation. Their sonic mourning is performed in recitations that include northern Albanian laments, which seek to excavate “uncried words”; Wayuu laments, which safeguard the soul’s passage to the Milky Way; Greek Epirotic laments, which bind the story of a life with its afterlife; and Yezidi laments, which map a topography of displacement and exile. Performed in New York in 2016 and in London in 2018, An Occupation of Loss probes the anatomy of loss and the intricate systems used to manage contingencies of fate and the uncertain universe.
Performance continues to intersect with Simon’s photographic work. Her 2018 exhibition at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, included two performance-based works, A Cold Hole (2018) and Assembled Audience (2018). In the former, Simon transports the ancient ritual of cold water immersion into the museum, inviting the public to seek the uncertain opportunity for a quick fix. Cold-water plunges’ long history of notable participants includes Apache leader Geronimo, who employed cold-water immersion to prepare boys for manhood and battle; biologist Charles Darwin; and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The shock of plunging into freezing water overrides thought and elicits from participants a gasp like that experienced during sudden death, sleep arrhythmia, and birth. Assembled Audience probes the phenomenon of engineered applause. Over a one-year period, Simon recorded the claps of individuals attending events at the three largest venues in Columbus, Ohio, a city nicknamed “Test City, USA” because its demographics so closely mirror those of the nation as a whole. She layered these recordings into a dense soundscape that plays in a darkened space, gathering individuals with divergent political, corporate, and ideological allegiances into a single crowd that surrounds the viewer. The MASS MoCA exhibition also featured the first major museum installation of Simon’s bookwork, a central aspect of her carefully researched multimedia work.
Photo: courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
#TarynSimon
Website
Exhibitions
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023
The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2022
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
In Conversation
Taryn Simon and Teju Cole
This spring, as part of the Lambert Family Lecture Series at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Taryn Simon joined Teju Cole for an online conversation about her artistic practice and creative process.
Taryn Simon: An Occupation of Loss
In Taryn Simon’s performance work An Occupation of Loss (2016), professional mourners enact rituals of grief, simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations from within a sculptural installation. This video by filmmaker Boris B. Bertram documents the April 2018 performance of this work with Artangel in Islington, London.
The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection
Joshua Chuang, the Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library, discusses the institution’s singular Picture Collection, the artist Taryn Simon’s rigorous engagement with it, and four instances of its little-known role in the history of art making.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
Cast of Characters
James Lawrence explores how contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of the library.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.
From Mortal Bodies to Immortal Crowds
Two immersive installations by Taryn Simon presented at MASS MoCA in 2018–19 examined the rituals of cold-water plunges and applause. Text by Angela Brown.
The Bigger Picture
Free Arts NYC
Meredith Mendelsohn discusses the impact of Free Arts NYC and its mission to foster creativity in children and teens, on the occasion of its twenty-year anniversary.
Obscuring the Index
Taryn Simon’s 2016 exhibitions spanned the globe. Angela Brown brings us highlights from six museums.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Paris Photo 2023
Still Life Stilled
November 9–12, 2023, booth b10
Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris
www.parisphoto.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Paris Photo 2023 at the Grand Palais Éphémère. Still Life Stilled is a catalytic presentation, organized by Joshua Chuang, of historical and contemporary works that explore photography’s unique capacity to both invest inanimate tableaux with substance and find meaning in suspending the theater of life.
Gagosian’s booth at Paris Photo 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Man Ray 2015 Trust/ADAGP, Paris 2023; ©️ Estate of Jan Groover; © Kwame Brathwaite; © Jeff Wall; © 2023 June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation; © Tyler Mitchell. Photo: Thomas Lannes
Auction
Printed Matter
Spring Benefit Auction
May 24–June 8, 2023
This online benefit auction for Printed Matter features over sixty donated artworks—some of which were created especially for the fundraiser—by contemporary artists, including Richard Artschwager, Piero Golia, Adam McEwen, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, and Jonas Wood. Proceeds from the auction, which is hosted by Artsy, will support the nonprofit organization’s mission to further the distribution, understanding, and appreciation of artist’s books and related publications.
Piero Golia, The Best Is Yet to Come, 2020 © Piero Golia
Artist Spotlight
Taryn Simon
June 23–29, 2021
A storyteller and researcher driven by the mutability of fact and the documentary potential of fiction, Taryn Simon directs our attention to systems of organization—bloodlines, circulating picture collections, mourning rituals, ceremonial flower arrangements—revealing the structures of power and authority hidden within. Working in photography, sculpture, text, sound, performance, and installation, she traces lineages of objects, families, nations, and histories.
Photo: Brigitte Lacombe
Museum Exhibitions
Just Opened
Humain Autonome
Déroutes
Through September 22, 2024
Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne,Vitry-sur-Seine, France
www.macval.fr
This exhibition focuses on the automobile as a paradoxical object, loved by some, hated by others. Production lines, operating systems, links with fossil fuels, myths, and the unconscious are all analyzed, deconstructed, and reassessed in works by more than fifty artists from different generations. Work by Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, and Blair Thurman is included.
Taryn Simon, Finance package for the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Baku, Azerbaijan, February 3, 2004, from the series Paperwork and the Will of Capital, 2015 © Taryn Simon
On View
Taryn Simon in
Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother
Through September 15, 2024
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
www.metmuseum.org
At a time when photographs are primarily shared and saved digitally, many artists are returning to the physicality of snapshots in albums or pictures in archives as sources of inspiration. Taking its title from a photograph by Maurizio Cattelan, the exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother brings together works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from the 1970s to today. The selected works reflect upon the complicated feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality evoked by these physical artifacts, while underlining the power of the found object. Work by Taryn Simon is included.
Taryn Simon, Chapter XI, from the series A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, 2008–11 © Taryn Simon
On View
Taryn Simon
Start Again the Lament
Through November 30, 2024
Cisternerne, Frederiksbergmuseerne, Frederiksberg, Denmark
frederiksbergmuseerne.dk
Start Again the Lament is an extensive sound installation by Taryn Simon broadcast into the subterranean urban dripstone cave of the Cisternerne. Performed by professional mourners, the work explores how people mourn individually and collectively, considering the anatomy of grief and whom we choose to guide us through it. These sonic rituals of loss and discontent—including northern Albanian, Wayuu, Greek Epirotic, and Yazidi laments—transform the exhibition space into an instrument echoing recitations with a reverberation of seventeen seconds.
Installation view, Taryn Simon: Start Again the Lament, Cisternerne, Frederiksbergmuseerne, Frederiksberg, Denmark, March 17–November 30, 2024. Artwork © Taryn Simon
Closed
Taryn Simon in
Guest Relations
November 4, 2023–April 28, 2024
Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai
jameelartscentre.org
Guest Relations brings together artwork and archival and architectural research to explore the historical, political, social, and cultural transformations that accompany processes of intense tourism. Examining the transactional nature of modern hospitality, the exhibition considers hotels as sites of artistic investigation, tracing their origins in colonial grandeur and hubris to their current, often generic, ubiquity in the age of globalization. Work by Taryn Simon is included.
Taryn Simon, Agreement to develop Park Hyatt St. Kitts under the St. Kitts & Nevis Citizenship by Investment Program. Dubai, United Arab Emirates, July 16, 2012, from the series Paperwork and the Will of Capital, 2015 © Taryn Simon