Taryn Simon explores ‘The Game’ of democracy • FRANCE 24 English

revealing the impossible the invisible and the many many layers behind an image taran Simon has a singular and meticulous approach to fine art photography if the average picture speaks a thousand words one of hers could probably write a book her latest show here in Paris explores the symbolism and structures within democracy and she’s in the studio to tell us more hello Taran and welcome hi now that exhibition I mentioned uh it’s called The Game at the Anmush Gallery here in Paris it takes iconic meaningful moments from the recent United States presidential election and I was very amused to see some McDonald’s French fries in one shot how are they linked to democracy well it sort of looks at where public attention went in the leadup to the US presidential election and where where that attention fell also kind of defines who and what we are and what we’re going to inhabit in many ways and so I was looking at the distractions and what captured the attention of the broader public so one was just days before the election um Donald Trump went and you know dunked fries oiled in oil salted them and served them to drive-through customers at a McDonald’s as a sort of media and publicity stunt and it garnered huge attention and um I assembled I got French fries from that very location and assembled them in this bleacher-l like fashion for the photograph but just um kind of contemplating that uh the sort of stage craft of power and how you have to kind of entertain and move the focus away from what actually matters and what’s at stake and it’s those distractions that together form this constellation that assembles a result at this point that seems to have nothing to do with what’s actually happening a very masterful manipulation of certain symbols important objects right and another piece in the show is the claritarian an interactive installation that allows five participants to create a randomized result let’s take a look at how it works [Music] the sculpture I made is called Claritarian and it’s based on surviving fragments of a machine that was devised to create a system whereby early democracy could operate in a non-corruptible way so Taran tell us how the claritarian works in the context of this exhibition the game right well it’s looking at how decisions are made and possible alternatives to how decisions could be made because in those early days of democracy it was actually imagined as something that all citizens could participate in and anybody could cast themselves for a position of leadership or to be on a jury and at that time that of course meant only male citizens but to imagine that today uh you could simply just put yourself into a slot and say you were game to be part of the game and these balls would drop and kick everybody else out and the final remaining chip would be the winner and that could be anyone totally random well another piece in the show uh it’s a film it has a quietly mesmerizing effect it’s called Haring Gay Ballot Count european Union membership referendum at the Great Hall Alexandra Palace it was filmed on June 24th 2016 a date that many British people will remember as the so-called Brexit uh vote we see people there counting ballots in the film tell us about your choice of this scene and what it tells us about history with a big age mhm i think uh when I look back at that also because I’m presenting it all these years later and sometimes you kind of can’t see something without that distance but there’s this kind of repetitive gesture and this real benol nature to the setting in which all those votes are counted and placed into these piles of leave and remain and you have all this paper and which is so weightless and yet the result is so heavy and there’s something about that action that in many ways betrays or feels so in contrast to all the activity that led up to that whether that was um motivated by you know economic interest racism nationalism whatever it is that that kind of sits beneath it all in the end the act that sort of differentiates between sides feels so kind of impotent and without any real impact and yet we all know the following morning there was enormous impact and in the following years as well and as an interdicciplinary artist your approach can be anthropological sort of documentary political when you take a very analytical scientific look at our society the structures that govern it the ru rules that we see in uh some of your images what do you make of our societal model yeah I think that’s what I’m grappling with and it’s also like who are we as individuals what comprises our our our brains and our decision making and our thinking and the ways we choose to inhabit the world and structure our world and all these assumptions um are just ideas and imaginations of something that could be completely different and so I feel like my work is always trying to kind of you know cycle through all of those questions and not not with any answers i mean why the moon why what is death you know we have all these big questions that we’ll never know but it’s I just try and kind of find the find the the reason which I know I’ll never find but I keep trying and your work involves a lot of research and sometimes administrative tasks so requesting permission to go certain places getting access to archives or documentation we read about that process in the texts that accompany your photographs often texts seem to be about as important as the visual for you what about the texts you find compelling what sort of stories grab your attention right i think stories that don’t have a clear answer so gray space where there’s this white noise and you can kind of have uh something going in one direction and something going in another and kind of looking at that space of conflict and trying to understand it and trying to really question every belief and foundation you may have and unearth something new but it’s really what I’m trying to establish is that noise and um it’s a feeling more than anything and that’s what I hope the work has a previous project of yours explores the primal human human right of passage which is grief and mourning uh for the series an occupation of loss you met with and photographed professional mourers to do document bereiements uh then a couple of years later many people around the world experienced loss on a huge and accelerated scale due to the co9 pandemic did that project that you made make you think about loss in a different way before and after the pandemic how did it affect your view of the project yeah there was this strange thing that happened after CO where everybody was experiencing the same disease in different ways of course but there was this kind of global mourning that took place around that and that project is looking at how we process through grief what are the rituals that we use to manage loss and how does that change by nation by economic standing by geography and I wanted to see the way different cultures handle that moment of um questioning and vulnerability and then created this performance where there was this cacophony of mourning of all these different ways of inhabiting that space it’s I mean there’s all these different ways of moving through loss um but I wanted to look at what it sort of reveals about the potential of any natural state beyond those levels of learning and programming and almost uh prophesizing of course the like you say the universal loss that we would deal with just a couple of years later and we’re now living in an era uh where hundreds of millions of images are being cataloged daily on our phones in our pockets eventually in the cloud do you think that this onslaught of images means that we have lost our ability to sort of revisit them or find the meaning in them how do you think the proliferation of smartphones uh is shaping our relationship with images now right well it’s developing almost like a a a third skin right they’re other creatures they’re creating other beings photography kind of freezes time it stops the continuum it makes you pause it creates something that is completely unreal but it’s absolutely linked to the real because it was documenting something that was actual or you believe to be actual so it has this very schizophrenic makeup between reality and fiction and I think when that’s kind of taken in this personal diaristic way which is what we’re seeing happening um it creates these kind of invisible beings and so we now have kind of doubled the global population because everybody has this you know avatar of sorts this invisible being floating around too so it’s us and the ghosts and um and then when you take that into political and um the implications of that we’re just living on these multiple layers now and photography plays a huge role in that and always has since it was ever developed has incredible power that’s something I I was going to say you’ve always said how powerful photography and imagery can be but now with AI coming in and perhaps distorting our relationship with photography do you think it still has the same power it once had well I think people are aware of the distortion right it’s like I have to teach my children about if someone calls and has a has my voice it may not be me i mean these are kind of standard lessons now so it’s like the same thing applies to photography and to images and news feeds and everything else so you at least are developing critical minds hopefully um but obviously yeah the levels of manipulation are scary and where do you think it will go in the future i have no idea i think we’re probably going to end up being a future of brats we’ll probably disappear but I hope not self-generating images as well yeah taran Simon thank you so much for joining us today we’re wrapping up the show with more contemporary art here in Paris with a multiensory installation from artist and composer Celestees Boss Mnu he’s behind a poetic and watery landscape featuring porcelain sculptures and a tinkling melody that’s at the BTO com we’ll leave you with a preview otherwise do check in with us here next time on Arts 24 there’s more news coming up just after this [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Her images reveal the impossible, the invisible, and the many, many layers behind a photograph. Taryn Simon’s singular and meticulous approach to fine art photography produces pictures that interrogate our political structures, our social conventions and our governing principles. Her latest exhibition “The Game”, on show at the Almine Rech gallery in Paris, zooms in on symbolic and significant moments during the presidential election last year in the United States, questioning the random nature of democratic processes. We talk about the power of photography in a world of smartphones and artificial intelligence and reflect upon the universal moment of mourning during the COVID-19 pandemic. 
#Taryn Simon #The Game #Almine Rech

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