PIERRE HUYGHE

Huyghe conceives exhibitions as fictions from which other modalities of reality, possible worlds and time could emerge, where subjectivities are formed, interact, learn, and evolve. His insightful exploration into a multidimensional and migrating self has been realised through a diverse array of dynamic works, including moving images, sound, living organisms, machine learning, and more. Over the past decade, Huyghe has questioned the relation between human and non-human, as well as the experience of time.

In the current exhibition, Huyghe explores the liminal state in which the human is radically de-centred, and an untamable inhuman or alternate subjectivity enables spectral conditions. These works continue his narrative and metaphysical approach to existence, seeking empathy with the impossible, listening to otherworlds. Opening a dialogue with a chimeric creature of his own making on how it may experience life, Huyghe reflects on our own constructs as hybrid creatures.

The works and the exhibition, interwoven, are entities in endless motion, propagative, generative and responsive to imperceptible environments and to themselves, accepting uncertainty and contradiction. They escape known hierarchies of human constitution as a locus for subjectivity.

In the ground floor gallery, Annlee-UUmwelt, 2024, features mental images produced by a brain-computer interface as a person imagines Annlee – a fictional anime character whose voice opens No Ghost Just a Shell, 2000, an empty image calling for collective imagination to give her life. Becoming a mediated avatar of her former self in Annlee-UUmwelt, Ann Lee’s mental images and voices are affected by the environment which includes the physical presence of humans.

In the back of the transparent screen, are Mind’s Eye, 2021, comprised of three materialised artefacts of deep image reconstruction. Extracted from a person’s mind, they are mental images from Annlee-UUmwelt, 2024 and UUmwelt, 2018, aggregates of synthetic and biological matter.

In the adjacent room, Cosmoseeded, an embryonic form in a pod, adrift in space, is a previous work repurposed as a sign for a collaboration, set to unfold in the coming year. Since 2012, Ali Brivanlou, Head of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Synthetic Embryology at The Rockefeller University, and Huyghe have engaged in conversations on projects which include making human feathers, developing temporal chimeras, or a brain organoid made from cells of various humans. In their latest discussion, Brivanlou introduced a groundbreaking idea, which Huyghe began to expand upon, imagining the universe as an agriculture field where a human synthetic embryo is propagated, as seeds to grow us anew.

On the second floor are mumblings, at times a chorus. Idiom (2024) are membranes sensitive to another world that vocalise an enigmatic presence through an unknown and ineffable language, learned in real-time, throughout the exhibition. Idiom is a community of masks. As voices flow through them, together they become a quasi-subject, attempting to exist here and now. Over time, as they wander in space and collect imperceptible information, a language is invented, carrying with it the spectres of past exhibitions.

The adjacent space features Camata, 2024, a self-directed film operated by a learning machine, a manifestation of an inhuman entity enacted upon by a set of robotic operators, performing a final rite of passage on a human skeleton found unburied in the Atacama Desert. As this enigmatic ritual unfolds live in front of us, we witness a transactional operation between a bodyless entity and a lifeless human body, a passage of life, a reincarnation. Camata’s live footage is the result of autonomous cameras decisions and is edited in real time. Sensors in the exhibition space capture a live human presence, disrupting its linearity.