The performance takes place at the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall at sunset, when the echoes of visitors who have entered the towers during the day becomes the echo of mourning. Visitors will be able to enjoy the installation until September 25th.
Description of the project by OMA
Park Avenue Armory and Artangel, London have co-commissioned artist Taryn Simon to create a major new work for the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, An Occupation of Loss.
A conceptual artist working primarily with image and text, Simon breaks form with her first-ever directed performance in a monumental sculptural setting, in which she considers the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems that we devise to contend with the irrationality of the universe.
On view September 13—25, 2016 at the Armory, An Occupation of Loss will be presented by Artangel in London next year.
Each evening at sundown, more than thirty professional mourners from many parts of the globe activate the installation of eleven concrete pipes, each measuring 48 feet in height, designed by the artist in collaboration with architecture firm OMA/Shohei Shigematsu. Like Zoroastrian “towers of silence,” the installation makes explicit the never-ending human need to give structure to death in order to understand it.
Within each towering structure, the mourners enact rituals of grief that resound throughout the vast drill hall. Their rituals are orchestrated by the collective presence, absence, and movement of the audience within the installation. Each performance unfolds from a convergence of unique and unrepeatable factors. The mourners’ recitations of tuneful, textual weeping include: Albanian laments, excavating “uncried words”; Venezuelan laments, safeguarding the soul’s passage to the Milky Way; Greek laments, binding the story of life with afterlife in polyphonic poetics; and Yezidi laments, mapping a topography of exile. The professional status of these mourners—performing away and apart from their usual contexts—underscores the tension between authentic and staged emotion, spontaneity and script.
Simon’s large-scale sculpture of inverted wells functions as a discordant instrument. During the daytime, visitors are invited to activate the sculpture with their own sounds and performances, as a subtle drone created from recordings of the mourners’ rituals provides echoes of the evening performances.
An Occupation of Loss probes the intangible authority of the mourners in negotiating the boundaries of grief between living and dead, ancient and modern, performer and bereaved. The cacophony echoing from the installation disorients exactly who, or what, is being mourned. Without a body at the center, there is no object to receive the mediation of grief, no end to the recitation of loss.
