Pierre Huyghe: Offspring

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This year Kunsten celebrates its 50th anniversary in its iconic museum, inaugurated in 1972, designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and assisted by Elissa Aalto and Jean-Jacques Baruël.

Its ever-dynamic contemporary art program is strengthened in 2022 by Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition Offspring, representing his first comprehensive solo exhibition in Denmark.

Pierre Huyghe (b. Paris, 1962) is in one of France’s most critically acclaimed contemporary artists. He has exhibited in numerous solo shows throughout the world, such as MoMA (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and Tate Modern (London).

For Huyghe the exhibition is not merely a site for viewer experience, but the manifestation of a “being milieu,” a creature with agency that perceives. He is continuously re-inventing his works and processes. Diverse intelligent life forms—biotic and abiotic— evolve indeterminately, creating complex environments. Typical to his works is the process of modification, unpredictability and interdependency. His works treat reality and fiction, living and inanimate, nature, humans, and technology equally, and are open to different dimension of reality.

Huyghes’ exhibition at Kunsten juxtaposes six interconnected works without a given path or flow. In its unique constellation Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt, 2012)—first installed in Kassel at the 2012 dOCUMENTA and includes a reclining female nude whose head is obscured by a colony of bees—has been re-instated in Kunsten’s museum park. Its living beehive embodies a form of non-human self-organization and collective intelligence. This sculptural collaboration between human and insect explores humanity’s ancient and symbiotic relationship with bees and reimagines the notion of sculpture, transforming it from an inanimate object into a living organism.

Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) connects us to The Way Untilled (2012), the cinematic footage Huyghe created when he transformed the compost in Kassel’s baroque park where both native and non-native, living and non-living objects intervene. More living creatures are cast in Huyghes’ aquarium Zoodram 2 (2010/2021). Recently acquired for Kunsten’s collection, Zoodram 2 features selected saltwater protagonists cast for their instinctual behaviours, or abilities, set on a cinematic stage of constructed conditions in which uncertainties can unfold. These works are joined by Offspring (2018), a machine driven by neutral network, which learns and plays infinite variations of the Gymnopédies 1&3 (1888), a piano composition by Erik Satie. The music is synchronized with patterns of light and emits smoke that obscure our perception and experience of other works in the space. The cinematic work De-Extinction (2014) takes us on a journey through an amber stone portraying insects mating, frozen in time millions of years ago. By returning to the origins of the world, it acts as a memory for organisms no longer living and challenges our own human notion of death as disappearance. It is complemented by Mating (2015), in which flashes of light from masks re-enact the phototactic behaviour of insects looking for mates and triggering responses in surrounding works and switchable glass panels, either transparent or opaque. The space appears empty or inhabited.

Each work is uniquely complex. Each can manifest or be absent, in a game of appearance and disappearance. Each is an emitter and receiver, and each has their own particularity, language, or presence. With this, the exhibition Offspring is an operating theater, a polyphonic body, in constant flux, as works take on new forms and dialogues with each other, generating ever evolving alliances, complexities and unfolding new possibilities between events or things, indifferent to human presence.

After the exhibition Zoodram 2 (2010/2021) will remain in Kunsten’s collection, an acquisition made possible by a generous donation from the New Carlsberg Foundation. Other works featured in the exhibition are on loan from two major French collections, Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Pinault Collection, as well as Marian Goodman Gallery, and the Pierre Huyghe studio.

The exhibition runs until October 30, 2022.

Watch the newly released interview with Pierre Huyghe titled I’m Not Interested in Binarity on Louisiana Channel.

From October 14, 2022 through April 10, 2023: Tal R & Mamma Andersson: About Hill. In the exhibition the Danish-Israeli artist Tal R (b. 1967) and Swedish artist Mamma Andersson (b. 1962) explore Nordic painting inspired by Swedish artist, Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911), whose quivering, quasi living landscapes and mysterious worlds emanate melancholy, symbolism and a psychologically unstable artistic existence.

For further information please contact our press department or Claire Gould, Chief Curator of Exhibitions, cg@kunsten.dk