PRESENTATION: Pierre Huyghe-In Imaginal

For Pierre Huyghe the exhibition ritual is an encounter with a sentient milieu that generates new possibilities of co-dependence between events or elements that unfold. The exhibition is an entity whose time and space, in which it appears, are constituents of its manifestation. His works are conceived as speculative fiction and often present themselves as continuity between a wide range of intelligent life forms, biological, technological and tangible inert matter that learn, modify and evolve.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive

Pierre Huyghe’s solo exhibition “In Imaginal” is the  U.S.  premiere  of  a  selection  of  works  seen  in  the exhibition “Liminal” at Punta della Dogana – Pinault Collection, Venice last year. In the current exhibition, Huyghe explores the liminal state in which the human is radically decentered, 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 other worlds.  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” (2018-24), 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”, Annlee’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 materialized artefacts of deep image reconstruction. Extracted from a person’s mind, they are mental images from “Annlee – UUmwelt” (2018-24) and “UUmwelt” (2018), aggregates of synthetic and biological matter. “UUmwelt – Annlee” is a co-production of imagination. Human imagination is reconstructed by an inhuman cognition. It has been externalized without the subject predetermining the outcome, bypassing all known modes of expression such as language or those vehiculated by the senses. Mental images are produced by a brain-computer interface, that captures the brain activity of a person imagining Annlee, herself an imaginary character. The mental images are reconstructed by a deep neural network, using processes of continuous optimization, learning, and recognition.  Once exhibited, the sequences of mental images are endlessly modified by several parameter linked to the surrounding conditions. On the second floor are mumblings, at times a chorus. “Idiom” (2024) are membranes sensitive to another world that vocalize an enigmatic presence through an unknown and ineffable language, learned in real- time, throughout the exhibition. “Idiom” is an unknown language that self-generates and emerges live. Specific features, some imperceptible by humans, are detected by sensors in masks that are worn by mute human carriers. The information is converted into particular phonemes and syntax then vocalized. Over time, a community is formed as a bodyless entity speaks through the masks. The language appears as ineffable, from another reality, outside of us. Set in the no man’s land around the city of Fukushima in Japan, the film “Human Mask” opens with footage of a drone navigating the desert city, just after the landslide and the nuclear catastrophe in 2011. In an empty restaurant, a monkey wearing a mask of a young girl repeats, like an automaton, the gestures for which it has been trained. Sometimes the animal seems idle, endlessly waiting. It shifts between instructions and instinct, between the necessary and the accidental. In this moment of suspension in the aftermath of a disas- ter, “Human Mask” presents a residual image of human presence carried by an unconscious actor and sole mediator, questioning the “human” mask we all are wearing. in “Camata” (2024), a set of machines seems to perform an unknown ritual, on the unburied skeleton of a young man, found in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It is the oldest and driest desert on earth, the testing ground of astronomers to study exoplanets, i.e. planets that exist beyond our solar system. The ritual performed by the machines appears at once as an endless funeral rite, an operating theater, and the learning process and formation of a specific lifeless subjectivity. The film is a self-presentation that endlessly edits itself, with- out linearity, beginning or end. Sensors located in the exhibition space continuously generate changes in its editing. As the enigmatic ritual unfolds live in front of us, we witness a transactional operation between different realities, a passage between a bodyless entity and a lifeless human body.

Photo: Pierre Huyghe, Camata, 2024, Robotics driven by machine learning, self-directed film, edited in real time by self-learning algorithms, sound, sensors, Edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proofs, © Pierre Huyghe, Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 385 Broadway, New York, NY, USA, Duration:  6/5-21/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com/