Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris), one of the world’s leading conceptual artists known for creating complex immersive ecosystems, presents a major new exhibition at the Serpentine. The gallery becomes a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligences, 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 they have been prompted to think of. One by one, each thought is reconstructed by a deep neural network and the images created in their mind are exhibited here. They are, however, in a constant process of reconstruction, endlessly modified by external factors – light, temperature and humidity levels, the presence of insects in the gallery, and the gaze of visitors.

The building will be subtly altered, affecting the conditions of the exhibition’s environment. Sanded walls will expose the layers of paint from previous exhibitions. The paint dust mixes on the floor and agglomerates with the rain leaking from the ceiling. The central gallery, transformed into an incubator, births thousands of flies that migrate towards the centre of the dome.