Press Release

PIERRE HUYGHE UUmwelt 3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019 Serpentine Gallery Sponsored by LUMA Foundation

Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press

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

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

Throughout the Gallery, large LED screens present images which began in the mind of a human. The 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 is 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.

Born in in 1962 and based in New York, Pierre Huyghe works on situations that are often based on speculative models. The environments he creates are complex systems in which interdependent agents, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, are self-organising, co-evolving in a dynamic and unstable mesh. Crucially, the different modes of existence and intelligence involved are often imperceptible to the visitors who encounter them. This new exhibition for the Serpentine follows Huyghe’s recent acclaimed projects, including After ALife Ahead for Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017; Untilled at (13), 2012; and The Host and the Cloud in 2010.

Technology has been a growing focus of the Serpentine programme in recent seasons across exhibitions, digital commissions and live programmes. Artificial intelligence was a core theme of the Guest, Ghost, Host Machine: Marathon in 2017, while spring 2018 saw exhibitions by artists Sondra Perry, exploring blackness as a technology, and Ian Cheng, who birthed a new AI artwork called BOB that evolved in real time during its Serpentine stay.

‘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 , 2018

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

Autumn at the Serpentine continues with Atelier E.B’s exhibition Passer-by at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (3 October to 6 January), the closing weeks of the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Frida Escobedo and open until 7 October. The second part of the Serpentine’s durational symposium, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, returns to ZSL London Zoo in November/December.

For press information contact: Rose Dempsey, [email protected], + 44 (0)20 7298 1520 V Martin, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1519 Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London W2 2AR

Join the discussion about the exhibition online at: Twitter @serpentineUK Instagram @serpentineUK Facebook /Serpentine Galleries

Discover more about Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition after its opening through new audio, video and text content on the digital Mobile Tour, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and accessible and free for all at sgtours.org

Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries; © Kamitani Lab / Kyoto University and ATR.

NOTES FOR EDITORS

About Pierre Huyghe Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) lives in New York. His exhibitions are complex systems in which interdependent agents, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, are self-organising and co-evolving in a dynamic and unstable mesh. Huyghe is the recipient of the Nasher Prize (2017), Kurt Schwitters Prize (2015), Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2013), Contemporary Artist Award, Smithsonian American Art Museum (2010), Hugo Boss Prize (2002), and Special Jury Prize at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). Selected exhibitions include Skulptur Projekte 2017, Munster, Germany (2017), Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2016), The Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission, New York, USA (2015), LACMA, Los Angeles, USA and Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (both 2014), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, (2013), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2012), Museo de Arte Contemporanea Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2010), Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2008), Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2006), Wollman Ice Rink, Central Park, New York, USA (2005).