Taryn Simon - Paperwork and the will of capital

Taryn Simon
Paperwork and the will of capital
2016

Texts by Daniel E. Atha, Kate Fowle, Nicholas Kulish, and Hanan al-Shaykh

26 x 34,2 cm, 10 1/4 x 13 1/2 inches
208 pages
Hardcover
English
Published by Gagosian and Hatje Cantz

ISBN: 978-3-7757-4157-6

The works presented in "Paperwork and the Will of Capital," though stand-alone artifacts, are borne of many invisible layers of Simon’s deep research and conceptual practice, laid out in this volume. In an essay by the critic Kate Fowle, the far-reaching background of Simon’s elegant floral imagery is traced, through the annals of international diplomacy and the vagaries power, as represented by deliberately the benign symbolism of flora. The economist and investigative journalist Nicholas Kulish discusses the shakeable world order since 1945, as seen by Simon in her body of work, and the botanist Daniel Atha looks at adaptation and survival in the plant world as a mirror for human political action. A short story by the fiction writer Hanan Al-Shayk winds in and around the work, extending and contextualizing its meaning.