Pierre Huyghe - Untilled Host

The Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is pleased to launch Pierre Huyghe – Untilled Host. The exhibition is produced in the framework of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” curatorial initiatives that showcase previously unseen holdings of its collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in München, Venezia, Beijing, and Tokyo, thus carrying out the Fondation’s intent to realize international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

Since the early 1990s, Pierre Huyghe continues to reinvent means of creation and exhibition display. His work explores the boundaries between production of reality and fiction through different media, including live situations, films, objects, photographs or drawings. The artist addresses many cultural themes, popular or academic, specific to contemporary society: science, science fiction, literature, philosophy, archaeology, film, music, architecture, connections between work and play. His approach often leads to collaborations with other artists, musicians, architects and scientists. Taking the exhibition and its ritual as an object in itself, Pierre Huyghe has worked to change the paradigm of this encounter, exploring the possibility of this dynamic experience. He constructs time-based situation, a self-generating network in which emergence and rhythm are indeterminate and exist beyond our presence.

For the exhibition Pierre Huyghe - Untilled Host, the Fondation Louis Vuitton presents two works by Pierre Huyghe belonging to its collection: The Host and the Cloud (2009-2010) and A Way in Untilled (2012). The selection and presentation of these works have been achieved in closecollaboration with the artist from the Fondation’s important collection of his works, including:

Les Grands Ensembles, 1994-2001 ; Silent Score, 1997 ; L’Expédition Scintillante Acte II, 2002 ; Mediation Hall, The Land, Model, 2003-2008 ; Streamside Day, 2003 ; A Journey That Wasn’t, 2005 ; Creature, 2005-2011 ; I do not own 4’33“, 2006 ; Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012 ; Untitled (Human Mask), 2014 ; Cambrian Explosion 9, 2014.

A major figure in the international scene, Pierre Huyghe embodies in his work the mechanisms of exhibition, its celebration, the presence of animal and human bodies, and the intensive quest in which he searches for his own identity. The Fondation Louis Vuitton has been particularly engaged with the artist, showcasing his work in its inaugural exhibition in October 2014. 

The Host and the Cloud (2009-2010) was filmed over the course of a year in the disused building that once housed the National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions in Paris. This experiment was a real situation that occurred in a closed museum which lies at the far end of an attraction park. It was witnessed live by an audience and partially recorded on three days: Halloween, Valentine’s Day and May Day. The experiment was conceived for a group of actors placed under certain conditions, facing influences they could alter or metabolize. It was created as a roleplay. The roles and behaviors of the actors, here the personnel of the museum, are changing through their encounters with the collection of displays, situations and fragmented narratives. The Host and the Cloud is a tale, a journey in the mind of an absent subject. The fictional character that appears in the film is an alter ego, the actuality in the mental landscape of an absent subject.

A Way in Untilled (2012) was shot during the summer of 2012 on the site of dOCUMENTA (13), in Karlsaue Park in Kassel. The images taken at dusk show organic decay happening around the sculpture Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), a half lying woman figure whose head is a swarm of bees. The head is obscured by a swarm. The colony pollinates aphrodisiac and psychoactive plants. The headless body is lying in the mud.It is as if a parallel world is materializing in front of the camera. A dog with a fluorescent leg is the main protagonist of this movie with no narration. The place is closed. Elements from different strata of history are laid next to each other with no sign of origin nor chronology.

There are physical adaptations of fictional and factual documents and preexisting things. In the compost of Karlsaue Park, the artifacts, inanimate elements, living organisms, plants, animals, human beings, and bacteria, are left to themselves, without culture, independent and indifferent to our presence.

Through these documentary films of science fiction, the artist plunges the viewer into a visual and audio odyssey.