[Exhibition]
Taryn Simon: Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

About This Event

In the fall, the Corcoran will present Taryn Simon: Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (November 17–February 24, 2013). Taryn Simon (b. 1975) produced A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters over a four-year period (2008–11), during which she traveled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. “In each of the 18 chapters,” the photographer has explained, “you see the external forces of territory, governance, power, and religion, colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.” She chose a wide variety of subjects, including feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein's son Uday, and the so-called living dead in India. Simon’s detailed archive of images and text is systematically organized in grids to reveal social changes driven by science, culture, and chance. This collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among order, chaos, genetics, and other components of fate. In addition to the Corcoran, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is traveling to Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.