Taryn Simon @ Corcoran Gallery of Art

Artist Taryn Simon presents the first complete East Coast exhibition of Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII from November 10, 2012 to February 24, 2013.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist traveled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen “chapters” that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents 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.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters highlights the space between text and image, absence and presence, and order and disorder.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII

November 10, 2012–February 24, 2013

The Corcoran Gallery of Art

Washington, DC

Image: Taryn Simon, excerpt from Chapter XVII, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII. Wilson Centre for Photography. © 2012 Taryn Simon.