The famous snail-shaped rotunda at New York’s Guggenheim Museum has probably recalled a marble run for many a visitor and now, it actually has become one, thanks to US artist Taryn Simon.
Head to the top floor of the museum’s rotunda in Central Park, Manhattan, and you may now turn a handle on a wooden cabinet filled with plastic balls.
That releases one of the colourful plastic balls which then rolls down a covered wooden track along the edge of the balustrade. It goes spiralling down the ramp, passing hundreds of photographs and other exhibits to finally land in a wooden collection tray.
The track acts as a metaphor for unpredictability, systemic power and personal memory.
A New Yorker born in 1975, the artist is already famous for her award-winning photo-essays, which have been shown all over the world.
Simon has now just opened “Father Country I Do Love You,” the first major solo exhibition by a female photographer in the famous Rotunda. It runs until March 14.
It centres on the life and work of a US federal agent and his involvement in numerous incidents and tragedies worldwide, paying tribute to her own father’s life.
He too worked as an agent before later running an amusement arcade in New York.
The artist reveals ripple effects of her protagonist’s actions and inactions, the museum says.
“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,” the museum says.
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.
Simon says she never got his full story. When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she realized she never would.
Her show moves 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,” the museum says.
They are “difficult to reconcile not because they are disconnected but because they are inseparable.”
Visitors gaze at a track for plastic balls in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which forms part of the exhibition “Father Country I Do Love You” by US artist Taryn Simon. Christina Horsten/dpa
Simon has also focused on how institutional archives categorize and control visual information. Here at her 2016 show, “A Soldier is Taught to Bayonet the Enemy and not Some Undefined Abstraction.” Sebastian Kahnert/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa