NEW YORK, NY.- The Guggenheim New York presents Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You, a major exhibition premiering a new body of work by artist Taryn Simon (b. 1975, New York). On view during the 250th anniversary of the United States, this presentation will bring together never-before-seen photographs, texts, videos, and sculptures into a singular, interactive installation filling the entire rotunda. It marks the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist in the iconic spiral rotunda and the largest debut of new work ever staged at the Guggenheim.
Nearly a decade in the making, Father Country I Do Love You (2026) traces the real life of one unnamed federal agent through 42 multipart artworks or “chapters.” The immense project is a labyrinth of stories in which Simon uncovers the ripple effects of her protagonist’s actions and inactions. Through duty, devotion, loss, and happenstance, the federal agent acted as a middleman, witnessing events great and small and collecting evidence for someone else to slot into the bigger picture. Stings and entrapments, traitors and child soldiers, impeachment and Hollywood, mass shootings and poison: everything he touched ricocheted to the outer boundaries of nations and lives he’d never know.
As the impacts of the agent’s stories reverberate throughout the Guggenheim rotunda, visitors step into the whirlwind Simon has assembled. From Quantico to Moscow, Beijing to Atlanta, the life of Simon’s central character unfolds in episodes. He eavesdrops on employees at the Soviet embassy, hoping to expose a rat. He babysits a model’s kids in a Hilton hotel while she lures D.C. mayor Marion Barry into a crack cocaine sting. He searches the rubble of the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi, where victims were blinded by flying shards of glass. He dissects hard drives and stumbles upon child pornography again and again. He takes a break while on assignment in Saudi Arabia to photograph a Flat Stanley for a friend’s kid back home.
On November 14, 2017, Simon and the federal agent met for the first time at a Mexican restaurant off an airport service road in Maryland. He told Simon story after story. They kept talking for nearly a decade—through phone calls, text messages, and visits. “It was hard to believe that one man could have his hand in so much. His oath was to the American people and the Constitution,” says Simon.
This exhibition serves as a turning point in Simon’s career, integrating personal storytelling into her practice for the first time. Father Country I Do Love You is dedicated to Simon’s father, whose life shadows the entire project. He lived in Thailand and traveled to Russia, Iran, Israel, China, Afghanistan, Korea, and elsewhere while working for the U.S. government, before ending his career manufacturing and selling billiards and arcade games. Simon never got his full story, and, upon his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, she realized she never would. “’But America,’ he always said, ‘is the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it,’” Simon recounts.
Invoking a distant place and time, the exhibition begins with an architectural intervention that transports visitors to Jim Thompson’s Bangkok home as seen through the eyes of Simon’s father. While living in Thailand in the late 1960s, Simon’s father met Thompson, the expatriate American silk magnate and former spy who disappeared in 1967. Later, when Simon was nine years old, she helped her father build a full-scale replica of Thompson’s teak-paneled living room in their home.
Throughout Father Country I Do Love You extraordinary events collide with ordinary lives, revealing the delicate coexistence of violence and grace, control and boredom, responsibility and fantasy, grief and routine—states that are difficult to reconcile not because they are disconnected but because they are inseparable. Visitors are repeatedly confronted by actions that cascade outward, producing unforeseen consequences. As they make their way up the Guggenheim’s ramps, visitors will encounter a teak track running down the inside edge of Frank Lloyd Wright’s parapet wall, sending billiard-like balls from top to bottom. Each ball’s color corresponds to the frames of one of Simon’s chapters. Only when visitors reach the top of the rotunda do they discover the’ source: a device, resembling one of Simon’s father’s creations, that invites them to propel a ball into a machine-like system. Once released, each ball winds down the museum’s spiral, passing the project’s stories, before coming to a stop alongside the other colored balls in an ever-changing outcome. “A single act of participation unfolds in ways that can’t be calculated,” says Simon.
“Once again proving herself the foremost artistic storyteller of her generation, Simon has created a profound and personal body of work that rebounds between anxiety, survival, empathy, and pleasure,” said Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media. “In this exhibition she shines a shaky spotlight on democracy, memory, and the invisible hands shaping the worlds we inhabit.”
On the occasion of this landmark exhibition, the Guggenheim and Hatje Cantz have copublished an artist book that includes all images and texts from the project, extending Simon’s ongoing love of bookmaking.
Simon has also created a unique audio guide for the project, hosted on Bloomberg Connects, that features narration by Jodie Foster and an AI-generated voice clone of the artist’s father.
Accompanying public programs will provide further opportunities for audience engagement with the exhibition. In September, December, and winter 2027, the Guggenheim will organize a series of weeklong residencies that build on the artworks’ stories through conversations and collaborations. On November 6, the Guggenheim and The New York Review of Books will copresent a special program featuring a cast of writers and cultural figures reading from Father Country I Do Love You, and on January 26 the museum will host an artist talk. The public will also have the opportunity to participate through daily programming of the exhibition’s interactive artworks, including Simon’s sculpture Kleroterion (2024)—a reimagined election machine based on a device from ancient Greece. For more information about the exhibition’s public programs, please click here.
Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You marks a significant moment in the Guggenheim’s ongoing relationship with Simon. All works in the exhibition have entered the museum’s permanent collection, where they join three earlier works by the artist.
Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You is organized by Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media. The exhibition was initiated by Nancy Spector, former Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator.
The project has been developed in collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, where it will be on view from fall 2027 through spring 2028.
Taryn Simon (b. 1975, New York) is widely recognized as one of the most significant conceptual artists working with photography today. Her projects, using photography, text, video, sculpture, and performance, center on storytelling, redirecting our attention to the unseen. Simon’s exhibitions and artist books include The Innocents (2000), which traces the stories of individuals imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, questioning photography’s function as a credible eyewitness; An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), which examines the divide between public and expert access through hidden and unknown objects and sites in the U.S.; A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008), for which Simon traveled the world tracing bloodlines and their related stories; Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015), which recreates flower arrangements that stood between men signing international treaties; and An Occupation of Loss (2016) in which professional mourners enact rituals of grief, simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations from within a sculptural installation.
Her work has been exhibited widely at such venues as Cisternerne, Frederiksberg, Denmark (2024); Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York (2024); Fondazione Prada, Venice (2022); the New York Public Library (2021); Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2018, 2021); Artangel, London (2018); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2016); Park Avenue Armory, New York (2016); Albertinum, Dresden (2016); United Nations, New York (2016); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2016); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2011); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2003); and has been prominently featured in numerous biennials and triennials. Simon’s honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the Photo London Master of Photography award, and the Innocence Project’s Award for Freedom and Justice.
