After drawing 25,000 visitors to last year’s inaugural festival, Photo Shanghai is eyeing an even bigger encore. Aerial performance artist Li Wei will soar above the Shanghai Exhibition Center during opening festivities while 50 galleries from around the globe will be in attendance. However, the big attraction is the Asian debut of celebrated American artist Taryn Simon’s seminal Birds of the West Indies.
Since drawing global praise for her 2003 series The Innocents, which documented individuals wrongly sentenced to life in prison but later released thanks to DNA evidence, Simon has crafted a style that explores the intersection of science and aesthetics.
“Science gives the appearance of authority or a clear answer. Graphic design plays a big role in rendering this sense of certainty to the public,” she explains. “I like toying with that relationship and creating systems that appear absolute, but are in fact just personal creations.”
Presented by New York’s Gagosian Gallery, Birds of the West Indies takes its name from the 1936 taxonomy written by American ornithologist James Bond. Avid bird watcher Ian Fleming appropriated the writer’s name for the British super-spy character introduced in his 1953 novel Casino Royale.
Now an iconic film franchise, Simon merges the two Bonds. The format of Bond’s original taxonomy is used to present an inventory of women, weapons and vehicles from the Bond films.
“The films journey through economics, race, gender politics, global politics, branding, identity, aesthetics and weapons development and proliferation in such a radical form,” she exclaims. “They truly stand as a powerful record of culture’s role in all of these categories.”
Photos of the famed Bond girls in the present day are displayed from 89-year-old Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger and pictured below) to 29-year-old Gemma Arteton (Strawberry Fields in 2008’s Quantum of Solace).
The project nearly derailed when Ursula Andress declined to revisit her Honey Rhyder character from 1962’s Dr. No. However, her absence turned into a blessing when Simon discovered Nikki van der Zyl, an uncredited English woman who voiced the character as well as a dozen more from the Bond series from 1962 to 1979.
“Honey Ryder is a fragmented creation; pieced together to compel,” Simon notes. “I created a film in which Nikki, who had always been invisible in the Bond universe, reads the complete lines of Ursula’s character and becomes visible. For me, she underscores the interplay of substitution and repetition in the preservation of myth and the construction of fantasy.”
10 of the 57 women from the Bond films declined to participate, their absence marked by a blank space. Simon was surprised not to be able to get their participation, given her history of gaining access to seemingly inaccessible subjects or spaces, including the Hanford Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, the CIA’s art collection, objects seized at New York’s JFK Airport or albinos in Tanzania hunted by human poachers for witchdoctors that believe in the magical property of their body parts.
In the second part of Birds of the West Indies, Simon casts herself in the role of Bond the ornithologist. She identifies, photographs and classifies all the birds that appear from the Bond films, assigning each with the specific time, date and place the bird flew, whether real or imagined.
“I do find myself more interested in the camera as a machine, allowing me to inventory certain subjects that are then made into works through their relationship to text, space, font and graphic design,” she muses.
“I try to look at abstraction through something understandable, using photography and writing to highlight an invisible space between the two. It’s a space governed by interpretation, translation and manipulation.”
Simon remains in demand, recently completing a project for the current Venice Biennale exploring the paperwork of power. Meanwhile, Birds of the West Indies continues to impress since last year’s opening. Celebrities like Jared Leto, Henry Winkler, John Waters and Elle Fanning attended the show when it came to Beverly Hills.
“We are always looking to educate and impassion our audience. To do this, we need to show outstanding and relevant work from living artists alongside our commitment to showing icons from the history of photography,” explains Photo Shanghai fair director Alexander Montague-Sparey.
“With Taryn Simon’s show, we’re bringing a museum-quality show to Shanghai.”
// Sep 11-13, 11am-6pm, RMB100 per day or RMB230 for three-day pass. Shanghai Exhibition Center, tickets.
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