A Living Man Declared Dead And Other Chapters

In each of the eighteen 'chapters' that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is divided into eighteen chapters. Each chapter is comprised of three segments: an annotation, a large portrait series depicting bloodline members and a second series containing photographic evidence. 817 portraits are systematically arranged within their chapters. Simon includes empty portraits, representing living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The reasons for these absences are provided in the captions and include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever and women not granted permission to be photographed. Simon's presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents. These narratives are recognisable as variants (versions, renderings, adaptations) of historical or future episodes. In contrast to the systematic ordering of a bloodline, the seductive elements of these stories - violence, resilience, corruption and survival - disorient the work's highly structured appearance. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, will accompany an exhibition of the same name at Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Like the exhibition, the book will also be broken into eighteen chapters. Each chapter will house photographs of the work and extended captions and texts by Simon. Critical essays within the tome are by Geoffrey Batchen and Homi Bhabha.