With Offspring (2018), Pierre Huyghe offered in the Studio, “black box” located in the basement of the Bourse de Commerce, an original installation in the manner of a sensory and poetic experience, outside temporality and open to infinity, a journey of sorts.

This installation is conceived as a remanence or a genetic mutation of L’Expédition scintillante [The Scintillating Expedition] designed by the artist for his exhibition in Bregenz in 2002. This project was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym but also by a journey undertaken by the artist in an effort to observe the vulnerability of our environment. He spent one month on a polar expedition aboard the schooner Tara, a streamlined vessel that can travel over ice. In Pierre Huyghe’s own words: “I am interested in the vital aspect of the image, in the way in which an idea, artefact or language can flow into a contingent, biological, mineral and physical reality. It‘s not a matter of showing something to someone so much as showing someone to something.”

Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962) who currently lives in Santiago, Chile, continues to reinvent means and methods of creation and presentation. From films to objects and photographs to drawings, his work oscillates, in balance, between fiction and the production of reality, scholarly knowledge and pop culture, from biology to artefact, science to science fiction, music to cinema, architecture to literature, and archaeology to philosophy, over the course of his various collaborations. Founder of the Anna Sanders Film production company with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno, Huyghe presents himself as an “initiator of events”, of which video serves to record a faithful testimony. Is it possible to define humans? This question haunts his work and may be seen in pieces like Toison d’or (1993) and Human Mask (2014), featuring strange animal-human-cyborg hybrids.