Thought provoking art displays at Tate Modern

A new display at Tate Modern explores the ways in which five contemporary artists have used the camera to explore, extend and question the power of photography as a documentary medium.

Consisting entirely of new acquisitions to Tate’s collection, it includes recent work by Luc Delahaye, Mitch Epstein, Guy Tillim and Akram Zaatari, as well as two important earlier works by Boris Mikhailov. Between them they cover subjects as diverse as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, studio photography in Beirut, elections in the Congo, everyday life in pre- and post-Soviet Ukraine, and power production in the United States. Each room concerns one discrete project, in which the artist calls into question the relationship between the documentary value of photography and the museum as its proper context.

Another significant body of work by US artist Taryn Simon draws its title from the series on a faceless person from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. ‘A Living Man Declared Dead & Other Chapters’ produced over a time span of four long years starting 2008, saw Simon crisscrossing across the globe, meticulously researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories.

In each of the ‘chapters’ that collectively reflect the crux of the series, the external forces of circumstance, religion, territory or power collide with the internal forces of physical and psychological inheritance. The subjects documented include feuding families, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the sufferings of people in Brazil, and the ‘living dead’ in India.

Her pointed artistic comment, which maps the complex relationships among the various components of fate, is at once arbitrary and cohesive. Shivdutt Yadav’s depiction is a case in point. A column in The UK Independent by reviewer Laura McLean-Ferris explains: “The poor fellow discovered that he and his family members had been listed as dead; the land ownership transferred to other relations.

Simon has documented that they’re very much alive.” Among the images present on the footnote panel is something chilling, albeit attention-grabbing - A body, dead from leprosy floats in the River Ganges – one bleached white, the eyeballs swollen and pale, the face almost turned black with blood.

(Information courtesy: Tate Modern)