August Sander—Taryn Simon: A Lecture by Irina Kulik

Photography as art and historical document is one of the topics of Irina Kulik’s lecture featuring August Sander and Taryn Simon.

August Sander (1876–1964) was a German photographer best known for the series People of the 20th Century—a diversified portrait of the Weimar Republic’s society, including a chapter representing Jews during the anti-Semitic campaign. Sixty works from that series were originally published as a separate book, Face of Our Time, in 1929. With the establishment of the Nazi regime, many of Sander’s plates and negatives were destroyed, while another huge amount of his works were burnt in the 1946 fire in Cologne, leading the artist to quit photography. Sander is also known as a landscape, architectural, and street photographer, while his interest in typologies had a significant impact on conceptual art of the postwar period.

New-York born and based artist Taryn Simon (b. 1974) has been working with photography, sculpture, performance, text, and sound since the early 2000s, with all of her projects making use of an in-depth archival research. This multimedia approach allows the artist to address complex issues and articulate meanings lying “in the gaps between all information”, using her own words. Simon’s project Paperwork, and the Will of Capital (2015) was part of her first ever solo exhibition in Russia, Action Research / The Stagecraft of Power, prepared by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (2016), and traveled to other institutions in Europe, Asia, and the US. She participated in the 54th (2011) and 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and exhibits worldwide, focusing on performative mediums more recently.