A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I - XVIII

Gagosian Gallery / Wilson Center for Photograph, 2012. A fine copy with a small bubble to the spine panel near foot (a manufacturing flaw). Folio (13.5 x 10 inches). 774 pages. Black cloth. Originally published by MACK in 2011, this second edition was published by Gagosian and the Wilson Center the following year. All editions are now out of print. A Living Man Declared Dead And Other Chapters, I - XVIII was exhibited in Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2011), Tate Modern in London, England (2011), The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (2012), Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (2012), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2013), The Pavilion Downtown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2013), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2013), and Le Point du Jour, Cherbourg, France (2015).

"A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I - XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which the artist, Taryn Simon, travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. 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.

"Simon's presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents, making them recognizable as variations (versions, renderings, adaptations) of archetypal episodes from the present, past, and future. In contrast to the methodical ordering of a bloodline, the central elements of the stories - violence, resilience, corruption, and survival - disorient the highly structured appearance of the work. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters highlights the space between text and image, absence and presence, and order and disorder" (the publisher).