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Fries, Ballots & Democracy: Taryn Simon’s Paris Game Night

Fries, Ballots & Democracy: Taryn Simon’s Paris Game Night June 11, 2025Art Events, ParisOff

Behind the Curtain: Taryn Simon Makes Us All Players in ‘The Game’

Let me start with this: if the word democracy makes your eyes glaze over, you’ve clearly never seen it dressed in resin, framed in a Fox News microphone, or flanked by McDonald’s fries. But leave it to Taryn Simon – queen of quiet disruption and master of minimalist revelation – to remind us that politics is just theatre. And this summer, at Almine Rech in Paris, we’re all cast members whether we like it or not.

Her latest exhibition, The Game, is as cool and composed as a Baccarat table – and just as rigged. I walked in expecting provocation. I left feeling complicit. And perhaps that’s the whole point.

The centerpiece of the show is Kleroterion, an interactive sculpture inspired by an ancient Greek device used to assign citizens to public office by lottery. (Yes, we used to leave power up to fate. Now we use polling apps and billionaires.) The object itself is beautifully severe – cast in resin and metal, it looks like something you’d find in a sci-fi temple, somewhere between a reliquary and a roulette wheel. Insert a token. One wins. The rest are rejected. No logic. No mercy. Just a game, darling.

And while I wish I could say I won, I didn’t. Simon’s machine, it seems, has excellent taste in losers.

Taryn Simon
McDonald’s French Fries, Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, 2024
Archival inkjet print, in artist’s frame
69.9 × 83.8 × 4.8 cm
27 1/2 × 33 × 1 7/8 in
Edition of 4 + 2 APs
© Taryn Simon
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

The rest of the exhibition builds a universe that’s equal parts poetic and paranoid. There are photographs of riot gear, ballot piles, a Fox News mic (haunting, honestly), even a snapshot of red, white, and blue balloons suspended midair – like democracy waiting for its cue. Everything is absurdly elegant, disturbingly sterile. Like power dressed for a state dinner, knowing full well what it did.

There’s also a green carpet rolled out across the gallery floor. It evokes a billiards table, sure – but more than that, it screams: You are now inside the simulation. And trust me, no one escapes looking untouched. This is not your average stroll through an art show. This is Taryn’s arena, and you’re being studied.

Now, don’t expect drama. This isn’t a spectacle; it’s a slow burn. Her new video work, showing unseen footage from the 2016 Brexit ballot count, is hypnotic in its mundanity. It’s shot dead-on, no effects, just… paper shuffling. Endlessly. If it sounds boring, that’s because it is – and also because it’s brilliant. She’s saying: look how little it takes to rewrite history. One paper. One count. One push of a button.

For over two decades, Simon has made it her business to unveil the mechanisms behind the curtain – be it judicial systems, family trees, or geopolitical treaties framed with flowers. But here, in The Game, she’s stripped everything down to its bones. No smoke. No mirrors. Just systems, symbols, and the eerie silence of truth.

Taryn Simon
Miss Sassy, Springfield, Ohio, 2024
Archival inkjet print, in artist’s frame
69.9 × 83.8 × 4.8 cm
27 1/2 × 33 × 1 7/8 in
Edition of 4 + 2 APs
© Taryn Simon
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

And let’s not ignore the fact that this is happening in Paris. At Matignon. In June. When the city itself feels like a stage – cobblestones and scandal, couture and collapse. It’s deliciously ironic. It’s divine timing. It’s very Taryn.

So go. Play. Lose. Stare too long at a pile of french fries and wonder what the hell you’re really looking at. Because The Game isn’t just about politics. It’s about you. And me. And the stories we inherit without question. It’s high-concept and deadpan. Seductive and sinister. The most glamorous existential crisis you’ll have all year.

And yes, I’d lose to it again.

bisous, Shari

www.alminerech.com

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