Pierre Huyghe - Offspring
Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg
Through October 30, 2022
Photo: Pierre Munster
Offspring, 2018
Self-generative system for sound and light machine, sensors
84 × 260 × 220 cm
Courtesy of the artist; Pinault Collection
Credit image: Aurélien Mole
© Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe, Offspring (2018)As Huyghe was initiating a journey to Antarctica (2006), he conceived an instrument that could translate the surrounding landscape into sound synchronized with light and communicate with other species. Offspring is the descendant of that machine. A neural network learns the Gymnopédies 1&3 (1888) by the French composer Erik Satie and plays infinite variations of his piano compositions. While creating its own, unpredictable music, the machine learns from its environment and external conditions, such as temperature, humidity, living movement, and biochemical variations, which influence the sound it generated. (Intro to the art work from Huyghe's studio)
Pierre Huyghe, De-Extinction (2014)Extinct species of plants and animals discovered in fossils, such as amber, have been preserved from the natural stages of decomposition. Using macroscopic and microscopic motion-control cameras, De-Extinction is a journey through an amber stone, portraying a situation frozen in time and a search of insects caught mating millions of years ago. Slow panning close-up shots confuse the sense of scale as its soundtrack relays the whirring sounds of the camera. By returning to the origins of the world, the work acts as a memory for organisms and challenges the notion of death as disappearance. (Intro to the art work from Huyghe's studio)
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 Pierre 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.
Pierre 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.
The 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.
Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram 2 (2010/2021)Pierre Huyghe’s aquariums have become an iconic part of his artistic practice. His first was created in 2009, with each variation thereafter a unique work. Neither reproductions of naturally-occuring ecosystems nor stage sets, they are rather worlds of constructed conditions in which uncertainties can unfold. For that purpose, animals are carefully selected for their instinctual behaviors or abilities which repeated and vary over time, composing the dramaturgy of the aquarium’s environment. The monochromatic Zoodram 2, is home of diverse saltwater invertebrates such as brittle star, spider and horseshoe crab that cohabited with one longhorn cowfish.
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 Louis Vuitton Foundation and the Pinault Collection.
Pierre Huyghe was born in Paris, in 1962. He lives and works in Santiago and New York. He has presented numerous solo exhibitions throughout the world such as MoMA (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Tate Modern (London), the Ludwig Museum (Cologne) among others.
The exhibition is sponsored by Ny Carlsberg Fondet, Det Obelske Familiefond, Augustinus Fonden og Lektor Peer Rander Amundsens Legat.
Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg
Kong Christians Allé 50 - 9000 Aalborg
