Taryn Simon
dal 7/11/2013 al 1/3/2014
Segnalato da
7/11/2013
Taryn Simon
Museum Folkwang, Essen
There Are Some Who Are in Darkness. The show's title illustrates a central theme in the work of the US artist-making visible what has previously been concealed. The exhibition, compiled by the artist herself from the outstanding holdings of the collector Thomas Olbricht, presents a first survey of her 3 key series supplemented by a first presentation of her censored exhibition in China.
Works from the Olbricht Collection, Selected by the Artist
Museum Folkwang is delighted to present, for the first time, works by Taryn
Simon from her three series The Innocents, An American Index of the Hidden and
Unfamiliar and A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters.
A line from Bertold Brecht’s song “Mack the Knife” sets the tone of Taryn Simon’s new
exhibition. The show’s title illustrates a central theme in the work of the US artist –
making visible what has previously been concealed. The exhibition, compiled by the artist
herself from the outstanding holdings of the collector Thomas Olbricht, presents a first
retrospective of the three key series that make up this remarkable contemporary position.
It was her piece The Innocents, that first shot the young photographer to international,
fame in the middle of the last decade. This series of portraits shows people, often from
socially deprived backgrounds, who had been falsely convicted, at the scenes of their
alleged crimes. Simon advanced these perspectives in the photographs that form the cycle
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar: Focusing on a wide range of
different phenomena and incidents, initiatives and institutions of society, academia and
business, this series paints a dialectic narrative of modern life in the United States, which
seems to confute the great American legends of freedom and equality.
Her latest body of work A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, which has
already been exhibited in some of the world’s major museums, associates the coincidental
nature of human fate with the accompanying social determination as a result of politics
and world history, origin and class. Result of a global research the comprehensive saga
composed of 18 chapters, six of which will be on show in Essen, moreover paints a
picture of the historical distortions and global interweaving of people’s destinies at the
beginning of the 21st century.
The common thread that runs through Taryn Simon’s versatile oeuvre is the manner in
which the photographer illuminates the “Dark Side of Life”, thereby making visible things
previously concealed and introducing issues not yet discussed into the social discourse.
Moreover, what makes her work so exciting and innovative is the method in which she
uses textual narrative to extend the image, how she combines photography and narrative
to form an inseparable entity.
As such she represents one of the most important positions of an expanded concept of a
critical documentary photographic approach and presents an answer to Brecht’s famous
accusation that this medium was unaware of the social conditions at work behind the
obvious.
Image: Excerpt from Chapter VII, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII b. Graffiti in the Potocari battery factory used as a barracks by Dutch UN soldiers and Bosnian Serb soldiers after the fall of the Srebrenica enclave. Potocari battery factory, Srebrenica. © 2012 Taryn Simon
Press officer: Anna Littmann T +49 201 8845 160 F +49 201 8891 45000 anna.littmann@museum-folkwang.essen.de - presse@museum-folkwang.essen.de
Press talk, Fr, November 8, 2013
Museum Folkwang
Museumsplatz 1 D - 45128 Essen
Opening hours Tue – Sun, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Fri 10 a.m. – 10.30 p.m., Mondays Closed