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Gagosian Gallery
3 Merlin Street
Athens- Telephone
- 30.210 3640 215
Taryn Simon's last show, 'A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII', opened at Moma in New York and travelled on to Tate Modern via Moca in LA. It was a tour that established Simon - one of the guest editors in our October issue - as a first rank art star, a photographer who uses text, image and graphic design, narrative and intervention and asks questions of all of them. Simon matches meticulous composition with a master documentary maker's tenacity and ability to ask big questions through human-scale stories. Her pictures of obscure and obscured objects in 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar' meanwhile map a new post-9/11 America.
Her next show at the Gagosian Gallery in Athens - previewed above, alongside some of her seminal works - is a series of photographs taken over the last six years using the same frame size as Malevich's end-of-something-beginning-of-something else 'Black Square' of 1915.
Moving on from an American Index, Simon again shoots obscure objects of wider significance, this time against a deep black background. Subjects include an artificial heart; a human skin wallet; genetically modified mosquitos; a South African flame-throwing anti-hijaking system fitted on a Toyota Corolla; and a captive parrot with stress-related feather loss.
Meanwhile, as a Wallpaper* guest editor, she presents two new projects in our October issue that explore how the photographic image is classified and catalogued in a digital realm.

Simon has photographed disorienting subjects, each highlighting a specific cultural complexity, collapse or ambiguity within the exact frame size as Kazimir Malevich's 1915 Suprematist masterpiece. Pictured is: 'Black Square IV, The Blaster, South Africa, Invented by Charl Fourie as an Anti-Hijacking system photographed installed on a Toyota Corolla, one of the most frequently carjacked vehicles in South Africa, 2009'
(c) Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Simon has photographed disorienting subjects, each highlighting a specific cultural complexity, collapse or ambiguity within the exact frame size as Kazimir Malevich's 1915 Suprematist masterpiece. Pictured is: 'Black Square IV, The Blaster, South Africa, Invented by Charl Fourie as an Anti-Hijacking system photographed installed on a Toyota Corolla, one of the most frequently carjacked vehicles in South Africa, 2009'
(c) Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

'Black Square IX, Genetically engineered male mosquitoes of the species Aedes aegypti, 2012'
(c) Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
'Black Square IX, Genetically engineered male mosquitoes of the species Aedes aegypti, 2012'
(c) Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

'Black Square III, Human Skin Wallet, 2011'
(c) Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
'Black Square III, Human Skin Wallet, 2011'
(c) Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery