Taryn Simon Debuts 'Father Country' at Guggenheim — SkimNews
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- Taryn Simon's exhibition "Father Country I Do Love You" opens at the Guggenheim and runs until 14 March 2027, marking the first monographic show by a photography-based artist in the museum's spiral rotunda and its largest debut of new work ever staged there.
- The project took 10 years to develop and follows a retired federal agent through decades of espionage, conspiracy and violence, including the team originally tasked with finding the bullet that killed deputy White House counsel Vince Foster in 1993.
- Simon built the exhibition "almost like a novel," with color-coded chapters opening in the agent's first-person voice, and recreated the Bangkok living room of silk-businessman-spy Jim Thompson — who disappeared in 1967 — in the museum's lobby using fake teak.
- Father Country incorporates interactive installations including professional mourners, an in-gallery cold plunge and a voting machine, and traces tangential figures like Rasheeda Moore, whose sting operation once led to the arrest of a DC mayor and whom Simon tracked down decades later to photograph at a hotel pool.
- The exhibition concludes with a chapter on memory loss, linking the agent's transient global amnesia on election day 2020 with Simon's father's Alzheimer's diagnosis that same year; she dedicates the project to the father who "left out as much as he told."
- Simon's 25-year practice of archival rigor includes cataloguing seized contraband at JFK airport, importing more than 4,000 specimens to recreate floral centerpieces from international treaty signings, and gaining access to sites from a federal biothreat facility to a braille edition of Playboy.
Why it matters: For the Guggenheim, hosting Simon signals a programmatic shift: the largest debut of new work in its history goes to a research-intensive, archive-driven photographer rather than a painter or sculptor — a precedent for the rotunda. For Simon, who has spent 25 years building a practice out of correspondence, FOIA-style access and sheer patience, the show is a personal reckoning with her father's Alzheimer's and the state secrets he carried home from Thailand.
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