PRESENTATION: Pierre Huyghe-Offspring

The French artist Pierre Huyghe is one of the world’s leading artists. He creates porous and contingent environments, complex systems in which living and non-living, real and symbolic agents evolve. Although Huyghe intentionally alters the sites in which he works, events and growth are often encouraged to occur without his control.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Archive

Since the early 1990s, Pierre Huyghe has been working in diverse media including films, objects, living environment and the exhibition itself as a form, all are present in this exhibition. In Huyghe’s contingent universe, a wide range of intelligent life forms biotic and abiotic continuously produce changing environments. The works are dynamic and modified over time, often exceeding their condition of emergence and the artist’s control, as their developments are indeterminate. Huyghe does not consider the exhibition ritual as an asymmetrical experience but as an encounter with a sentient milieu, that perceives, generates new possibilities of alliances between events or things that unfold, indifferent to human presence. Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition “Offspring” at Kunsten juxtaposes six key works. Using sensors, which capture sound, light and movement among others, each work perceives and influences others as well as the exhibition rhythm and the way it manifests. The exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to see Kunsten’s newly-acquired work for the very first time: one of Pierre Huyghe’s famous living aquariums, The acquisition is totally unique to Kunsten: although they are considered key to his artistic oeuvre, Huyghe has not created very many of his aquariums. The acquisition was made possible by a generous donation from the New Carlsberg Foundation. A number of works featured in the exhibition have been loaned from two major French collections. The installation “Offspring” (2018) is conceived as a remanence or a genetic mutation of “L’Expédition scintillante” designed by the artist for his exhibition in Bregenz in 2002. This project was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym but also by a journey undertaken by the artist in an effort to observe the vulnerability of our environment. He spent one month on a polar expedition aboard the schooner Tara, a streamlined vessel that can travel over ice. In Pierre Huyghe’s own words: “I am interested in the vital aspect of the image, in the way in which an idea, artefact or language can flow into a contingent, biological, mineral and physical reality. It‘s not a matter of showing something to someone so much as showing someone to something”. Huyghe’s ecosystem aquarium “Zoodram 2” (2010,) is a microcosmic theatre whose real-life aquatic performers, selected by Huyghe for their specific behaviour traits, create unscripted and plotless narratives that play out in real time but are not time-based. The context and conditions imposed by the artist, however, more or less ensure a predictability: for example, the star of one aquarium, a hermit crab, quite naturally makes its home in the bronze cast replica of Brancusi’s “Sleeping Muse” (1910) that the artist submerged in the tank. Otherwise, the players are left to construct their own stories and, in so doing, potentially reflect or elicit emotional encounters with the land-based lifeforms gazing in at them through the glass. Huyghe’s work with human performers, as individuals, groups and communities, is similar. “A Way in Untilled” (2012) was shot during the summer of 2012 on the site of dOCUMENTA (13), in Karlsaue Park in Kassel. The images taken at dusk show organic decay happening around the sculpture “Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt)”, a half lying woman figure whose head is a swarm of bees. The head is obscured by a swarm. The colony pollinates aphrodisiac and psychoactive plants. The headless body is lying in the mud.It is as if a parallel world is materializing in front of the camera. A dog with a fluorescent leg is the main protagonist of this movie with no narration. The place is closed. Elements from different strata of history are laid next to each other with no sign of origin nor chronology.

Photo: Pierre Huyghe, Still from A Way in Untilled, 2012, HD video, colour, sound 14 mins, Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin, © Pierre Huyghe

Info: Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Kong Christians Allé 50, Aalborg, Denmark, Duration: 25/5-30/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 10:00-21:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://kunsten.dk/