Smuggled goods reveal much about our world
Ingredients for a date rape drug, a dead bird, fake Louis Vuitton handbags and sausages are just a handful of items confiscated by customs at JFK Airport in a year.
American artist Taryn Simon spent 24 hours a day for five days at one of the world's busiest airports, documenting the strange, mundane and disturbing material taken to create the exhibition Contrabond, which opened at Anna Schwartz Gallery this week.
That included items individuals were trying to smuggle in, as well as anything unacceptable that came from abroad to the international mailroom.
The show comprises 1075 of those photographs, presented quasi-museum style in a series of jewel-like cases.
It’s fascinating, poignant and remarkably revealing: the seized items become surrogate portraits of the people from whom they’ve been removed. The fact there are no humans in shot endows these inanimate objects with not just a mystery but somehow a humanity of their own.
What Simon expected to see was drugs and weapons. The reality was an insight into our consumerist, capitalist society – by far the biggest haul was counterfeit goods.
Seemingly endless quantities of fake luxury handbags and high end watches were confiscated, as were pirated movies and even counterfeit medications including Xanax and treatments for erectile dysfunction. Also on the list were a toy AK47 – complete with goggles – a deer penis, syringes and Botox.
Having been deluged with so many unusual offerings, she was surprised to come across a banana. The idea that a humble banana could be 'weaponised' and deemed contraband amused her.
At the opposite extreme, the most shocking item was a bird, sent from Indonesia to Miami, Florida. Labelled as home decor, the customs official said it was likely to be used in a witchcraft ritual.
The most moving item she photographed was the sausages. “To me that just symbolises the standard movement of bodies and travel and ... also a gift and sustenance, and something that is brought across cultures,” she says. “And that, suddenly, under the eyes of government, being interpreted as a threat, I found that contradiction quite moving.”
Simon also found someone’s immigration application to the US in the contraband room. It made her think about fate and the lot of that individual who was accidentally “put in the wrong bucket”.
“What that implies for an individual’s life and future … and just having a sense of how precarious that process can be and what just a small error, seemingly unintentional or just sloppy, can imply.”
Contraband is at Anna Schwartz Gallery until May 18.