Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII

Simon (b. 1975) produced A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII 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 artist 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 "living dead" in India. 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 has traveled to Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.