Pierre Huyghe is one of the most important artists working today. His work has questioned almost every aspect of the making of art and the ways in which it is entangled with exhibition-making and the construction of art history. Those who encounter his work are given prompts, clues to follow his thoughts or to begin their own contemplative perceptions of the world. Over the course of the last decade, Huyghe’s practice has migrated, slipping in and out of traditional art contexts and temporalities, appearing outside of these as often as inside. In both types of space, however, he has found ways to bring human visitors within a set of systems that include biological communities as well as technologies, transforming normally static exhibitions into living organisms. What Huyghe brings together can be passive or active, programmed or self-generative, but those that are able to grow or change are allowed to do so, without further intervention from or control by the artist. Together, the ensemble of components form a dynamic, networked landscape in which all agents, living or not, have the ability to affect one another, regardless of whether they are doing so consciously.

Exomind (Deep Water), 2017, which can soon be discovered in the gardens of Verdala Palace, is part of a group of works developed by Huyghe in the last ten years that circle around questions that are now urgent in the development of and human relationship to Artificial Intelligence and our place in the world: how entangled in our surroundings are we? Can we, or should we even consider our thought processes and experiences as separate from our environment? As in other examples of Huyghe’s practice, this work has the capacity to grow and change itself beyond the control of the artist. It offers us the opportunity to reflect on our place in the earth’s complex ecosystems in a way that might prompt a repositioning that is no longer anthropocentric.

Pierre Huyghe’s Exomind (Deep Water) will be unveiled during the MICAS International Art Weekend and is organised in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, London, UK.