This program is fully booked. To be added to the waitlist, please email your full name, contact number and number of guests to programs@ngv.vic.gov.au and you will be contacted if tickets become available.
Taryn Simon is widely recognised as one of the most exciting and renowned conceptual artists of her time, working across a range of media including photography, installation and performance. Having redefined photography in a ‘post-photographic’ era, Simon reveals the deep secrets and paradoxes of the world around us, uncovering patterns of human behaviour to suggest new and unsettling relationships between art, truth, politics and history.
In her first public appearance in Australia in many years, Simon will discuss her working methods, the intensive research that underpins her diverse bodies of work and her productive use of the indexical nature of the photographic image.
The evening will include reflections on key bodies of work including An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Contraband, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII, A Polite Fiction, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, A Cold Hole and her acclaimed performance works An Occupation of Loss and A Cold Hole.
The conversation between Taryn Simon and Louise Neri, Director, Gagosian, will be introduced by Dr Simon Maidment, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, NGV.
Presented in collaboration with Anna Schwartz Gallery and Gagosian.
This is an Auslan interpreted program.
Speakers
Taryn Simon was born in New York, where she lives and works. Simon received a BA in semiotics from Brown University in 1997. In 2001 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for what would become her first major photographic and textual work: The Innocents (2002), which was exhibited at MoMA PS1. Documenting cases of wrongful conviction in the United States, The Innocents calls into question photography’s function as a credible eyewitness and arbiter of justice.
Simon has exhibited in museums and institutions throughout the world. Her work is included in notable public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, USA; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, USA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Tate Modern, London, UK; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Louise Neri is a curator, editor, writer working in the visual and performing arts. She was the founding Director of Gertrude Contemporary, and from 1990-2001, she was the editor of the international art journal Parkett. She co-curated international biennials of contemporary art, including the Whitney (1997) and Sao Paulo (1998 and 2000). Since 2006, she has been a director at Gagosian.
Dr Simon Maidment is Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, and a lead curator of its groundbreaking NGV Triennial. His PhD research used curatorial practice as a method to investigate art’s potential to influence social and political change.
Taryn Simon, Contraband, is on view to 1 June at Anna Schwartz Gallery.