The Guggenheim’s rotunda is the hardest room in New York to use well. The spiral is a single continuous path, so a show there is a sequence whether the artist wants one or not, and most exhibitions either fight it or ignore it.
Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You, opening September 18 and running through March 14, 2027, uses it as structure. The work is 42 multipart artworks, described as “chapters,” tracing the real life of a single unnamed federal agent and the consequences of his actions and inactions over four decades. It’s presented as one interactive installation filling the entire rotunda, built from never-before-seen photographs, text, video and sculpture.
Two firsts come with it: the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist in the rotunda, and the largest debut of new work the museum has ever staged. It’s curated by Nat Trotman, initiated by former artistic director Nancy Spector, nearly a decade in the making. The works enter the Guggenheim’s permanent collection, and there’s an artist book co-published with Hatje Cantz.
Why this belongs on a creative-technology site
Simon isn’t a digital artist, and this isn’t a screen-based show. It’s here because of what it does structurally, which is something the field talks about constantly and rarely achieves at this scale.
Simon’s practice has always been about systems, archives and classification: photographing what institutions keep hidden, mapping bloodlines and consequences, treating research apparatus as the artwork rather than its support. A Living Man Declared Dead and Others was a database rendered as an exhibition. That is, structurally, the same problem an interactive artist faces — how do you make a large body of linked information navigable, and what does the navigation itself argue?
Here the medium is a spiral ramp, and the “interactive” element is a visitor walking a path through a branching story. 42 chapters about consequence, arranged along a continuous ascent, is a design decision about how information reveals itself over time, made with architecture rather than code.
The thing to watch for
When you see it, the question worth carrying is whether the building’s linearity serves the material or flattens it. A story about ripple effects — the reverberations of one man’s choices across four decades and multiple countries — is a network, not a line. The rotunda enforces a sequence.
That tension is the interesting part, and it’s the same one every large interactive work has: the structure of the story versus the structure of the space it lives in. Simon has had nearly ten years to think about it, in a room that gives no quarter. Worth the trip to find out how it resolves.