Taryn Simon : An Occupation of Loss [April 2018, Artangel, London and September 2016, Park Avenue Armory, New York City]

27 x 16cm. Paperback in glassine sleeve, 99pp. With bi-fold colophon notes. Commissioned by Artangel and Park Avenue Armory. This is one of the rarer books published with this title (and in similar formats) containing redacted reproductions of visa applications relating to the professional mourners performing in the artist's project, constituting an immersive artist's book rather than a practical monograph. This publication marked the culmination of seven years' work with professional mourners, anthropologists, and historians. Audiences visiting 'An Occupation of Loss' descended into a half-built, subterranean, concrete opera-house where professional mourners all simultaneously broadcast their lamentations, enacting rituals of grief from around the world. Their sonic mourning is performed in recitations that include northern Albanian laments, which seek to excavate "uncried words"; Venezuelan laments, which safeguard the soul's passage to the Milky Way; Greek Epirotic laments, which bind a life with its afterlife; and Yezidi laments, which map a topography of displacement and exile. The glassine wrap is quite chipped. Otherwise good condition.…