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Gagosian is pleased to announce its participation in Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair with a special project space marking the release of Taryn Simon’s An Occupation of Loss on limited-edition vinyl, published by the Vinyl Factory. Visitors to the project space can experience the album at individual listening stations during its first presentation in the United States.
Commissioned jointly by Artangel and the Park Avenue Armory, An Occupation of Loss was first presented in September 2016 at the Park Avenue Armory, New York. In April 2018, a second performance took place in London, beneath Islington Green in a cavernous secret crypt selected for its unusual sonic properties.
In An Occupation of Loss, professional mourners enact rituals of grief, simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations, many of which trace their origins to pre-Islamic and pre-Christian times. Their sonic mourning is performed in recitations that include laments from Northern Albania, which seek to excavate “uncried words”; the Wayuu people of Colombia, safeguarding the soul’s passage to the Milky Way; the ancient Greek state of Epirus, binding the story of a life with its afterlife; and the Middle Eastern Yazidis, mapping a topography of displacement and exile.
Throughout history, professional mourners have been granted the authority to occupy, negotiate, and shape the experience of loss. Despite this responsibility, mourners have often been marginalized by governments, economic systems, and orthodoxy. An Occupation of Loss considers the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems we devise to manage the abstract certainty of death.
The double album includes both live recordings made in the space below Islington Green and studio recordings of each lament performed by the professional mourners who collaborated on the London performance. The accompanying 80-page book, designed by Simon and her longtime collaborator Joseph Logan, presents the lyrics of the laments, their English translations, and Simon’s portraits of the performers. A section documenting the performers’ visa application processes foregrounds the underlying structures of global exchange, the movement of bodies across borders, and the hierarchies of art and culture. A special art edition of the book, of which only 350 copies were produced, features a collection of photographs taken by the mourners.
On the occasion of the release of this latest publication, Gagosian will offer an opportunity to acquire a selection of books from Simon’s extensive publishing practice of the past ten years.
Taryn Simon was born in 1975 in New York, where she lives and works. Collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Exhibitions include Contraband, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2011); Rear Views, A Star-forming Nebula, and the Office of Foreign Propaganda, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015); 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); An Occupation of Loss, presented by Artangel and the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2016); An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2016–17); Paperwork and the Will of Capital, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017); and A Cold Hole + Assembled Audience, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2018–19). Simon’s honors include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography and a Photo London Master of Photography award.
Preview tickets are available at nyartbookfair.com.
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Taryn Simon, An Occupation of Loss, 2019 © The Vinyl Factory
