Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) is one of the most influential artists of his generation. He is known for his boundary-dissolving works, in which fiction and reality seamlessly merge. His creations arise at the intersection of various disciplines, combining cinematic, technological, digital, physical and biological elements into living and dynamic situations, in which sensibilities and new subjectivities can take shape and evolve over time.

Camata I is a film still from Pierre Huyghe’s film Camata, which was shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It shows a set of machines performing an unknown ritual around the skeleton of a young man, discovered lying unburied in the desert. Exactly what is taking place here remains open: is it a ceremony, an experiment or the emergence of a new form of consciousness? While the machines observe the skeleton and carry out their tasks, the endless ritual simultaneously becomes a continuous learning process. An inanimate subjectivity evolves out of all that they capture, record and process.

The film itself, too, has neither beginning nor end. Camata explores the transition from a human body to a disembodied presence and poses fundamental questions about perception, intelligence and the boundaries between organic and machine life.

Photograph

Edition: 1/5 + 2 AP

64 x 96 cm (image)

77 x 109 x 4 cm (framed)

Provenance: donated by the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Esther Schipper and Hauser & Wirth