Taryn Simon’s Untold Stories of the FBI Go Up at Guggenheim

One agent is the unlikely protagonist of over 1,000 new photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations in ‘Father Country I Do Love You.’

Summary

Taryn Simon unveils her exhibition, 'Father Country I Do Love You,' at the Guggenheim Museum in New York

The largest body of work to debut in the museum's history, the show spans photography, video, installation, and sculpture all based off of the accounts of an unnamed ex-FBI agent

Simon dedicates the show to her father, also an ex-government worker, whom the structure and closing act is based off of

Taryn Simon’s new exhibition, Father Country I Do Love You, covers almost every surface of the Guggenheim’s spiraling rotunda. Her work, much of it appearing pristine, unearths messy, invisible contours of power. The over 1,000 new photographs, videos, sculptures, and text works on view can be traced back to the wild life of just one man, and, for many, you have to see it to believe it.

An unnamed FBI agent guides her through the dark maze of the American government for her most ambitious show yet — and the largest body of work ever to debut at the Guggenheim. Organized by Nat Trotman and Nancy Spector, with support from Bottega Veneta, the exhibition was nearly a decade in the making. It chronicles the life of the agent, who acted as a “middleman” in most of these operations, and traces one person’s commitment to duty, to his country, and the livelihoods he’d be willing to put on the line for it.

The exhibition is organized into 42 chapters, and each, ensnaring in their earthy, twee palettes, is built around a subject or side character in a story by the agent. Just beyond an opening portrait of a Quantico-trained Jodie Foster, for example, is the “pool room,” washed floor to ceiling in a serene, aquatic teal. Within them is a series of Moore family portraits, shot in the pool where Rasheeda Moore lured former D.C. mayor Marion Barry into the 1990 drug sting that led to his arrest.

“Espionage home searches were rare but kind of fun,” the agent told Simon. Plinths topped with roadkill photographs trail into another mustard-yellow section. Massive glossy shots of luxury accessories, all seized and later auctioned by the government, anchor “Un-American Rat 1: A lot of action at government auctions.” The project tells the story of Paul Ames, who was just 5 when agents raided his house, taking most of his family’s possessions, after his father, Aldrich Ames, was arrested for his involvement with the KGB.

Another section, this one a heather plum tone, mounts a tenderly posed body of work, titled “The windows exploded,” which captures those left blinded or visually impaired by the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998. Below each, short bursts of text detailing what they last saw — from “A bright light going up, going up like a twinkling star” to “I don’t know what I saw because I was 2.” Over and over, Simon humanizes, digging through headlines to give justice to the people buried underneath.

While it’s a titular nod to patriotism’s patriarchal streak, Father Country I Do Love You is also an ode to Simon’s father, a former government worker turned arcade-machine manufacturer. In 2020, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and the show itself, as you move up, echoes memory loss in its organization, culminating in a pinball machine circling the rotunda, topped with a video of him shuffling through his Kodachrome slides taken around the world.

“His photographs are the only things that call back the memories. Sometimes he calls out to things I can’t see,” Simon wrote for the exhibition’s closing sequence. “He recorded everything and expected me to do the same.”

Father Country I Do Love You is now on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York until March 14, 2027.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave,
New York, NY 10128