BASEL.- This summer, Fondation Beyeler presents the first solo exhibition of Pierre Huyghe (*1962, Paris) in a Swiss museum, bringing together new works, recent films, and selected earlier pieces by one of the most innovative artists of his generation.
For more than two decades, Pierre Huyghe has challenged conventional ideas of what an exhibition can be, as exemplified by his participation in Documenta 13 (2012) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017). He is recognized for creating exhibitions as speculative fictions from which emerge other modalities of the world – with continuities between life forms, technology, biological and inert matter, that constantly learn, modify, and evolve. His works are not static objects, but dynamic situations shaped by time and unpredictability.
Conceived for the Fondation Beyeler, the exhibition becomes a site-specific experience where each work and the in-between form an ambiguous threshold. Through the interplay of shifting works, combining moving images, sound, objects, living organisms, and machine learning, the exhibition unfolds to the rhythms of Apnea, 2026. An artificial breathing organ, curled underwater, breathes at a human rhythm, its membrane oscillates according to apnea. Air, sound and subtle vibrations circulate through walls, until they are desynchronized or interrupted, forming a shared respiratory field that permeates the entire exhibition.
This indeterminate state extends further in Alchimia, 2026, where a worm, a larval ancestor of the human unconscious, lies at the threshold of a door. Animated by breath, it murmurs and hums into surrounding matter in a polyphony of voices; when deprived of air, it falters and convulses. Like Apnea, it foregrounds respiration as both a physical and symbolic force, shaping our experience.
Subtle experiences, as much felt as observed, open onto an encounter with the unknown. This condition is reinforced by the presence of his most recent film, Liminals, 2025. Liminals, unfolds as a contemporary myth, it simulates a non-human condition and explores uncertainty. A hollow and faceless human-like figure emerges from shifting states and attempts to exist in a realm outside time and space. “A liminal state, incessant dance of matter”, as described by the artist, where multiple possibilities coexist at once, where every moment is a maybe. As inner and outer realms fold together, boundaries between body, environment and shaping forces dissolve. The film explores whether one can relate to such a reality at all, and what conditions might allow multiple states of existence to be experienced at once.
In this exhibition, a large, closed gate, Adversary, 2026, stands as a threshold, at once image and access to what lies beyond. A mental image, a co-production of imagination between human and machine, materialized in a bas-relief door. One single image actualized among all possibilities of mental images. In Camata, 2024, a set of machines appears to perform an unknown ritual on an unburied skeleton found in the Atacama lifeless desert in Chile. It is at once an endless funeral rite, a learning process, and the formation of a bodyless subjectivity. Without linearity, beginning or end, the film is continuously re-edited in real time through sensors embedded in the exhibition space. Within the exhibition, in Timekeeper, 2026, layers of walls paints and sediments settle across surfaces, while Light Dust, 2026, spreads throughout the space, forming a continuous floor. Coloured dust, shifting patterns, and casted artificial light unfold across floors, walls and the ceiling, making time and light perceptible matter.
The works no longer operate as isolated entities but emerge as permeable situations. Movements, images, and events emerge – sometimes synchronized, sometimes dissonant. Earlier works and new productions coexist as active presences within a set of relations that continually reconfigure themselves, giving rise to new narratives.
The exhibition at Fondation Beyeler invites visitors into a “soulscape”– an inner world composed of multiple temporalities, voices, and states. A polyphony that opens onto moments of contradiction and perplexity. It continues the artist’s exploration of a metaphysical and fictional approach to existence, without hierarchy between fiction and reality, the living and the artificial, the human and the non-human. Both sensory and reflective, the exhibition adopts an outside perspective that extends beyond the human experience, becoming the site of formation of subjectivities and opening onto alternative dimensions of reality.
For Pierre Huyghe “fictions are vehicles that give us access to other possible worlds, to a counterfactual imagination. Such fictions, separated from the known, unconstrained by the here and now, are open to speculation, to other roads not taken. They make it possible to experience ourselves from the outside.”
Curators: Mouna Mekouar, Curator at Large, Fondation Beyeler; and Anne Stenne, independent curator. Project Managers: Charlotte Sarrazin, Associate Curator, Fondation Beyeler; and Paola Ravagni, Head of Production and Exhibition, Pierre Huyghe’s Studio
