In Past Show

About Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe says that life is the core interest of his practice: “I’m interested in how to quantify the different variations of being alive…how to intensify the presence of things.” Many of his performance, film, and installation pieces employ a range of living creatures—insects, plants, animals, and human beings—in order to explore their behavior and interactions. These works become laboratories for articulating complex social phenomena, the precarious distinction between fiction and reality, and contemporary belief systems. In the 1990s, Huyghe became known best for his “post-production” technique, or the reuse of film and mass-media images; more recently, he has mounted his work outside of museums and traditional art venues, calling these environments too restrictive. Huyghe is also known for his many multimedia collaborations with other artists throughout his career, including Philippe Parreno and Douglas Coupland. Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2002.