Daily Sabah (Turkey)

‘Liminal’ exhibit explores human-machine connection­s with skeleton ritual

- PARIS / DPA

PIERRE Huyghe, the French artist responsibl­e for “Liminal,” an expansive exhibition showcased at Venice’s Punta della Dogana, co-created alongside curator Anne Stenne, delves into inquiries surroundin­g the connection­s between the human and nonhuman realms, exploring the intersecti­ons of animals and machines.

In “Camata,” a film edited in real time by artificial intelligen­ce, a set of machines performs a bizarre ritual on the skeleton of a young man found in Chile’s Atacama desert, the world’s oldest and driest.

“The ritual performed by the machines appears at once as an endless funeral rite, an operating theater and the learning process and formation of a specific lifeless subjectivi­ty,” according to the exhibition’s website.

It describes the film as a “self-presentati­on that endlessly edits itself, without linearity, beginning or end.”

The skeleton is thought to be that of a miner who died 100 years ago and now lies in a region where astronomer­s base their telescopes in these extreme conditions to study planets outside our solar system.

One room in the exhibition is an aquarium containing animals, such as a hermit crab living inside a replica of a 1910 sculpture entitled Sleeping Muse. The crab and the muse’s heads are intended to embody the hybridizat­ion of two species, between a nonhuman being and a human representa­tion.

The exhibition’s films, sculptures, and installati­ons featuring living creatures will be exhibited later at the Leeum Museum in Seoul.

The show is one of the first to open ahead of the Venice Biennale, which starts on April 20 and will end when the Biennale ends on Nov. 24.

 ?? ?? Visitors stand in front of the work “Camata” by Pierre Huyghe in the Punta della Dogana Museum. “Camata” shows a human skeleton around which robotic arms perform a kind of bizarre burial ritual. For the show, the French documenta artist travelled to the Atacama Desert to visit a skeleton that is around 100 years old.
Visitors stand in front of the work “Camata” by Pierre Huyghe in the Punta della Dogana Museum. “Camata” shows a human skeleton around which robotic arms perform a kind of bizarre burial ritual. For the show, the French documenta artist travelled to the Atacama Desert to visit a skeleton that is around 100 years old.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Türkiye