Pierre Huyghe's Speculative Ecologies at Fondation Beyeler

Pierre Huyghe's new exhibition at Fondation Beyeler in Basel presents a comprehensive survey of works blending biology, AI, and robotics. The show opens with live ants crawling from a wall, fed through a flap like zoo animals, and includes a blind, pale worm-like robot that visitors are warned not to touch as it is not alive. Central works include 'Camata', a film in which machines circle a human skeleton in Chile's Atacama Desert, edited in real-time by AI, and 'Liminals', a film commissioned by LAS Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation, created with quantum physicist Tommaso Calcaro and philosopher Tobias Rees. 'Liminals' features a faceless female figure with a black hole for a head, born from rubble, wandering through rain and twilight. The exhibition also includes 'Human Mask' (2014), showing a monkey in a girl mask in Fukushima's exclusion zone, and Max Ernst's 'The Witch' on loan. Huyghe's work explores the boundary between living and non-living, organic and technological, often set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. The show follows criticism of 'Liminals' at Berlin's Berghain in January, where it was called 'Edelkitsch' (luxury kitsch).