Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt – Serpentine Gallery – 3 Oct 2018 to 10 Feb 2019

https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/pierre-huyghe-uumwelt

Pierre Huyghe, one of the world’s leading artists, known for creating complex immersive ecosystems, presents a major new exhibition at the Serpentine. For the exhibition, the Gallery has become a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligence, biological reproduction and instinctual behaviours.

‘I don’t want to exhibit something to someone, but rather the reverse: to exhibit someone to something.’ Pierre Huyghe

Throughout the Gallery, large LED screens present images which began in the mind of a human. Brain activity is captured as a person imagines a specific situation that the subject has been prompted to think of. One by one, each thought is reconstructed by a deep neural network and the images created are exhibited in the Gallery, where they will be in a constant process of reconstruction, endlessly modified by external factors – light, temperature and humidity levels, the presence of insects, and the gaze of visitors.

The Serpentine Gallery building has been subtly altered, affecting the conditions of the exhibition’s environment. Sanding the walls, dust from the paint of previous exhibitions lies on the floor. The central Gallery, transformed into an incubator, is birthing thousands of flies that migrate towards the centre of the dome.

‘When what is made is not necessarily due to the artist as the only operator, the only one generating intentions and that instead it’s an ensemble of intelligences, of entities biotic or abiotic, beyond human reach, and that the present situation has no duration, is not addressed to anyone, is indifferent, at that moment perhaps the ritual of the exhibition can self-present.’  Pierre Huyghe in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2018

‘[Huyghe] is not interested in creating fictions, but new realities; the realities he has created have proved unsettlingly visionary.’  ArtReview

The exhibition contains live flies. Steps have been taken by the Serpentine Galleries, with advice and assistance from specialists, to ensure the utmost care of the flies included in this installation. Please see this leaflet for more information.

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital Mobile Tour supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.