Pierre Huyghe “The Host and the Cloud”

French Institute Alliance Française

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FIAF Gallery

A former ethnographic museum outside of Paris provides the setting for French artist Pierre Huyghe’s investigation into the nature of ritual. Centering on three separate days—the Day of the Dead, Valentine’s Day, and May Day—over the course of a year, Huyghe captures a group of people circulating in the museum and being exposed to external influences, that they repeat and modify. In navigating through the galleries, as well as history, various proceedings come into focus: a legal trial, a dance, a hypnosis session, and a coronation, among others. These situations are presented by professionals or reinterpreted by people wearing masks of light.

The Host and the Cloud, will play on a continuous loop in the FIAF Gallery throughout Crossing the Line.

Born in Paris 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-organizing, co-evolving in a dynamic and unstable mesh. Selected solo exhibitions include UUmwelt at the Serpentine Galleries (London, 2018), Orphan Patterns at the Sprengel Museum (Hanover, Germany, 2016), The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe, at Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2015), and Pierre Huyghe at the Ludwig Museum (Cologne, Germany, 2014) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014). He was featured in group exhibitions including After Alife Ahead at Skulptur Projekte Münster (Germany, 2017), Tino Sehgal at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2016), Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms at the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). In 2017, Huyghe was awarded the Nasher Prize for Sculpture. He was also the recipient of the Kurt Schwitters Prize at the Sprengel Museum (2015), Roswitha Haftmann Prize in Zurich (2013), the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award (2010), the Hugo Boss Prize (2002), the Special Jury Prize awarded by the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), and received the DAAD Artist in Residence grant in Berlin (1999–2000).