Pierre Huyhe: TarraWarra International 2015

Set over a timescale that spans 30 million years, Pierre Huyghe’s latest exhibition starts the clock ticking and we haven’t a second to waste.

Not doing anything in halves, this epic showcase is the first solo exhibition by contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe as part of the TarraWarra International series. Setting a global outlook, the series focusses on leading contemporary art within the international context.

Creating art as statement, Huyghe’s works alert the viewer to the complex issues of climate change and global warming. For this exhibition the starting point is Huyghe’s founding of The Assocciation of Freed Time in 1995. This collaborative proposal focussed on liberation temporal horizons, and at TarraWarra Huyghe’s projects generate science-fictional time-zones.

Curated by Amelia Barikin and Victoria Lynn, the exhibition involves key early works and recent, setting a conceptual timescale of epic proportions. From ancient fossilised amber, a journey through Antarctica in search of a mythical creature, to a compost heap in a park in Kassel – zones of real and unreal, local and international are disintegrated.

“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.”

Crawling insects, a host of spiders and a colony of ants traces lines and pathways across the gallery.

Director of TarraWarra Museum of art, Victoria Lynn commented on Huyghe’s dark abstractions, stating, “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.”

Whilst finding his origins in France, Huyghe’s striking works reveal global issues that speak with increasingly relevance to Australia’s context. This ability to communicate with signs and symbols speaks of a well-refined practice that is inherently international to its core.

Striking and sometimes uncomfortable, Huyghe deftly moves between reality and fiction in his practice to reveal everyday issues that are purposefully ignored by the unwilling observer.

Excerpts from Pierre Huyghe: TarraWarra International 2015 exhibition at TarraWarra Museum of Art

EXHIBITION
Pierre Huyghe: TarraWarra International 2015
29 August – 22 November
TarraWarra Museum of Art

Courtesy the artist, Tarrawarra Museum of Art and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.