Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You
Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You premieres a monumental body of work by artist Taryn Simon (b. 1975, New York). Filling the entire rotunda, the presentation brings together never-before-seen photographs, text, videos, and sculptures into a singular interactive installation. Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You marks the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist in the museum’s 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.
The federal agent’s narrative is shadowed by the life of Simon’s father, who lived in Thailand while working for the United States government before ending his career manufacturing and selling arcade games. Simon never got his full story, and upon his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, she realized she never would.
On view during the 250th anniversary of the United States, Father Country I Do Love You darts between anxiety, survival, empathy, and play, shining a shaky spotlight on democracy, memory, and the consequences of individual acts. Over and over again, extraordinary events collide with ordinary lives, revealing the delicate coexistence of violence and grace, control and boredom, responsibility and fantasy, grief and routine—states difficult to reconcile not because they are disconnected but because they are inseparable.