The earlier exhibition at Punta della Dogana, collective Icônes, left an unparalleled perceptual and intellectual impact, and so will the fresh perspective of their new exhibition, dedicated to Pierre Huyghe.
Huyghe is one of the most experimentational artists of his generation. For Pierre Huyghe, the ritual of the exhibition is an encounter with a sentient milieu that generates new possibilities of interdependence between events and elements that unfold. His works are conceived as speculative fictions and are often presented as a continuity of several forms of intelligence that learn, modify, and evolve during the exhibition.
A major figure in questioning the relationship to non-human in art, Pierre Huyghe (b. Paris, 1962) adopts, from his earliest work, a perspective other than human – inhuman – to reveal something beyond our comprehension, beyond our possibility of experiencing it. Pierre Huyghe challenges our perception of reality and, by constructing other possible, proposes to become foreign to ourselves.
“I find it hard – says Huyghe – to acknowledge a single truth and submit to the exercise of reductionist formulas. In my relationship with reality, I play, and I try to put forward rational, well-constructed thought.”
The ritual of the exhibition is, as such, a meeting with a sentient context that generates new possibilities of interdependence between events and elements as they manifest. Huyghe’s art are speculative pieces of fiction that reveal in a union of different forms of intelligence – biological or technological – which in turn learn, grow, and evolve over the course of the exhibition. They are places of possibility, of fictional excess, undetermined and indifferent to labels and observations.
For Punta della Dogana, the artist creates his largest exhibition to date and transforms the venue into a dynamic environment, a transitory state, whose time and space, as well as everything that enters, visible or invisible, are constituents of the works. Populated by inhuman, human, and non-human entities, affected by natural and artificial phenomena, the exhibition explores, in real time, the conditions for different entities to coexist, or hybridise, without hierarchical distinction or specific determination.
“To think of something, to find avenues, to find fiction, possibilities to avoid the beaten track, the same old mental processes and reject ideas we already know about and access to new and different worlds.” (Huyghe)
