AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE

Curators Amelia Barikin & Victoria Lynn

From renowned French artist Pierre Huyghe comes an exhibition spanning 30 million years: a journey that takes us from a single, ancient piece of fossilised amber; through to Antarctica in search of a mythical beast; and finally to a decaying compost heap in a park in Kassel, Germany.

The first solo exhibition of Huyghe’s works in Australia, this remarkable show weaves living creatures into its artworks, with spiders and ants tracing lines and pathways across the gallery walls.

Pierre Huyghe includes a number of the artist’s key early works together with recent, critically acclaimed projects such as A Journey that wasn’t (2005), Umwelt (2011), and A Way in Untilled (2012). The timescale for the exhibition spans 30 million years. It begins with a trip through an ancient piece of fossilised amber; takes a journey to Antarctica in search of a mythical creature, and terminates in a compost heap in a park in Kassel. The gallery is inhabited by living creatures; a host of spiders and a colony of black ants trace lines and pathways across the walls.

The curatorial starting point for the exhibition is Huyghe’s founding of The Association of Freed Time in 1995, a collaborative proposal for liberating temporal horizons.  At TarraWarra, Huyghe’s projects are envisioned as a series of temporal excavations, highlighting art’s potential to generate science-fictional time-zones and develop alternate chronological platforms.

“For Pierre Huyghe”, curator Amelia Barikin says, “time is volatile. It folds and unfolds, disperses and multiplies. Collapsing distinctions between past, present and future, the exhibition speculates towards a non-linear mode of history, in which non-human time scales and non-human agencies play equal part.”.

Victoria Lynn says “Pierre Huyghe collapses art and nature into an intriguing journey through light and dark, sound and music, installation and film taking us to mysterious and poetic horizons.”

Pierre Huyghe was born in Paris in 1962, and attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (1982–85). His work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions at leading institutions across the world including LACMA (2014); Centre Pompidou (2013); Tate Modern and ARC, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2003); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000). He lives and works in Paris and New York.