This video documents the first major solo museum exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to Pierre Huyghe (1962, Paris), presented by the Fondation Beyeler. The show brings together newly created works and key pieces from recent years. Known for his practice that merges living systems, technology, fiction, and ecology, Huyghe transforms the museum into a dynamic, sentient environment — a place where boundaries between human, non-human, and machine blur. In this video, we take you on a complete walkthrough of the exhibition spaces, capturing the immersive installations, atmospheric lighting, and the unique living presence that defines Huyghe’s universe. From contemplative film works to evolving ecosystems, this exhibition continues Huyghe’s exploration of complexity, emergence, and co-existence. Exhibition dates: May 24 – September 13, 2026. Video Walkthrough: Pierre Huyghe at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen (Basel, Switzerland), May 22, 2026.

Extended version for Members (27:38 Min.):

Press text (excerpt):

This summer, Fondation Beyeler will present the first solo exhibition of Pierre Huyghe (*1962, Paris) in a Swiss museum, bringing together new works, recent films, and selected earlier pieces by one of the most innovative artists of his generation.

For more than two decades, Pierre Huyghe has challenged conventional ideas of what an exhibition can be, as exemplified by his participation in Documenta 13 (2012) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017). He is recognized for creating exhibitions as speculative fictions from which emerge other modalities of the world – with continuities between life forms, technology, biological and inert matter, that constantly learn, modify, and evolve. His works are not static objects, but dynamic situations shaped by time and unpredictability.

Conceived for the Fondation Beyeler, the exhibition becomes a site-specific experience where each work and the in-between form an ambiguous threshold. Through the interplay of shifting works, combining moving images, sound, objects, living organisms, and machine learning, the exhibition unfolds to the rhythms of Apnea, 2026. An artificial breathing organ, curled underwater, breathes at a human rhythm, its membrane oscillates according to apnea. Air, sound and subtle vibrations circulate through walls, until they are desynchronized or interrupted, forming a shared respiratory field that permeates the entire exhibition.

This indeterminate state extends further in Alchimia, 2026, where a worm, a larval ancestor of the human unconscious, lies at the threshold of a door. Animated by breath, it murmurs and hums into surrounding matter in a polyphony of voices; when deprived of air, it falters and convulses. Like Apnea, it foregrounds respiration as both a physical and symbolic force, shaping our experience.

Subtle experiences, as much felt as observed, open onto an encounter with the unknown. This condition is reinforced by the presence of his most recent film, Liminals, 2025. Liminals unfolds as a contemporary myth, it simulates a non-human condition and explores uncertainty. A hollow and faceless human-like figure emerges from shifting states and attempts to exist in a realm outside time and space. “A liminal state, incessant dance of matter”, as described by the artist, where multiple possibilities coexist at once, where every moment is a maybe. As inner and outer realms fold together, boundaries between body, environment and shaping forces dissolve. The film explores whether one can relate to such a reality at all, and what conditions might allow multiple states of existence to be experienced at once.

In this exhibition, a large, closed gate, Adversary, 2026, stands as a threshold, at once image and access to what lies beyond. A mental image, a co-production of imagination between human and machine, materialized in a bas-relief door. One single image actualized among all possibilities of mental images. In Camata, 2024, a set of machines appears to perform an unknown ritual on an unburied skeleton found in the Atacama lifeless desert in Chile. It is at once an endless funeral rite, a learning process, and the formation of a bodyless subjectivity. Without linearity, beginning or end, the film is continuously re-edited in real time through sensors embedded in the exhibition space. Within the exhibition, in Timekeeper, 2026, layers of wall paints and sediments settle across surfaces, while Light Dust, 2026, spreads throughout the space, forming a continuous floor. Coloured dust, shifting patterns, and casted artificial light unfold across floors, walls and the ceiling, making time and light perceptible matter.

The works no longer operate as isolated entities but emerge as permeable situations. Movements, images, and events emerge – sometimes synchronized, sometimes dissonant. Earlier works and new productions coexist as active presences within a set of relations that continually reconfigure themselves, giving rise to new narratives.

The exhibition at Fondation Beyeler invites visitors into a “soulscape”– an inner world composed of multiple temporalities, voices, and states. A polyphony that opens onto moments of contradiction and perplexity. It continues the artist’s exploration of a metaphysical and fictional approach to existence, without hierarchy between fiction and reality, the living and the artificial, the human and the non-human. Both sensory and reflective, the exhibition adopts an outside perspective that extends beyond the human experience, becoming the site of formation of subjectivities and opening onto alternative dimensions of reality.

For Pierre Huyghe “fictions are vehicles that give us access to other possible worlds, to a counterfactual imagination. Such fictions, separated from the known, unconstrained by the here and now, are open to speculation, to other roads not taken. They make it possible to experience ourselves from the outside.”

The Artworks:

In Umwelt, ants form paths across a gallery wall, indifferent to human presence. In Sans titre, a carpet records repeated movement, tracing the path of humans over time and leads into Light Dust, a continuous field of coloured dust and cast artificial light that spreads throughout the entire space of the exhibition, making time and light feel almost tangible.

Timekeeper reveals layers of wall paint from past exhibitions. The resulting dust is tracked across the surrounding space by walking visitors, revealing an archaeology of exhibitions shaped by accumulation and sedimentation. Estelarium is a basalt cast of a pregnant belly that links human and geological time, holding a moment before birth. Together, the works in rooms 1 and 2 lend the space a shifting and transitory character.

Liminals unfolds like a myth of our times, imagining a non-human condition and exploring uncertainty. The character emerges as a hollow, faceless figure, shifting between states as it attempts to exist beyond time and space. This liminal condition unfolds as an ongoing dance of matter, where multiple possibilities coexist simultaneously and each moment remains unstable. As inner and outer worlds fold into one another, the boundaries between body, environment and forces dissolve, raising the question of whether such a reality can be experienced at all – and how multiple states might exist at once.

Cambrian Explosion 19 evokes some of the earliest complex life forms, emerging in fragile and unstable conditions. Buoyant with encapsulated air, a volcanic rock floats in the aquarium, as if defying gravity. At the bottom, there are live species from the Cambrian Explosion, which took place over 500 million years ago. They have remained nearly unchanged since their primordial origins. Their behaviours extend beyond individual lifespans, repeating through reproduction.

Apnea is an artificial breathing organ, curling underwater, breathing at a human rhythm as its membrane oscillates in phases of apnea. Air, sound and subtle vibrations circulate through holes in the walls, gradually desynchronizing or breaking, forming a shared, unstable respiratory field across the exhibition. Other elements in the exhibition undergo transformations in rhythm with Apnea, such as Alchimia in room 8, which appears and recedes as the glass panels change their appearance in synchrony with Apnea’s breath. Meanwhile, the colours of L’hésitant, a tentative threshold moving across the ceiling between rooms 4 and 6 and rooms 7 and 8, are distantly echoed by those of the floor. Together, these works create an enigmatic, subtle experience – felt as much as seen – sustaining a sense of uncertainty.

Set in the nuclear exclusion zone around Fukushima, the film Human Mask opens with a drone’s view of an abandoned city after disaster. Inside an empty restaurant, a monkey wearing a human mask repeats learned gestures like an automaton, then pauses, waiting without purpose. It moves between training and instinct, control and accident. In this moment of suspension following the disaster, the figure faintly evokes human presence.

In Adversary, a large, closed gate stands as a threshold – at once image and access to what lies beyond. The high bas-relief materializes one image among all possible mental images emerging from a shared process of human imagination and machine computation, unfolding not as a fixed image but as a shifting field of perception. Each viewer encounters a different projection of images and meaning, as perception continuously reshapes the work. Nearby, the presence of Max Ernst’s painting The Witch creates an echo across time, linking Adversary to the painter’s explorations of the unconscious and indeterminate. His figures, both chimerical and hybrid, are in a state of transformation. L’adestinée explores chance and perplexity – an enigma without answers whose outcomes remain unresolved and unpredictable.

In Camata, a set of machines appears to perform an obscure ritual around an unburied skeleton discovered in the Atacama Desert, Chile. At once an endless funerary rite and a process of learning, the scene suggests the emergence of a bodiless subjectivity. The skeleton of a young man lies on the ground as the machines observe and perform their operations. What unfolds remains uncertain: a ceremony, an experiment or the emergence of another form of consciousness? What is sensed, recorded and edited manifests the formation of a lifeless entity. Without beginning or end, the film is continuously re-edited in real time, influenced by sensors in the exhibition space – tracing a passage between a human body and a bodiless presence.

Idiom is a self-generating language that emerges in real time during the exhibition. Sensors embedded in a mask worn by a silent “carrier” capture subtle signals – some beyond human perception – which are then vocalized by the mask. This evolving and unknown language suggests a vision of a world beyond our own. Alchimia extends this idea. A worm-like form, at the threshold of a door, evokes a larval ancestor of the unconscious. Animated by breath, it murmurs and hums, developing a shifting polyphony; deprived of air, it weakens and convulses. Together, these works explore other forms of language, shaped by breath, environment and presence.

In this video we have a look at the exhibition “Venetian Diary” by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and the Venetians at Ca’ Tron in Venice, Italy, and speak with the curator of the show, Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, and Emilia Kabakov. Three years after Ilya Kabakov’s death, Venice is presenting this major participatory project by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Conceived as a collective self-portrait of the city, the work gathers diary entries and personal objects from approximately 550 residents of the Venice metropolitan area, representing diverse generations, professions, and backgrounds.Displayed from 9 May to 28 June 2026 at Ca’ Tron, a sixteenth-century palazzo on the Grand Canal, and at the Venetian Pavilion in the Giardini, the exhibition features the contributions in thematic vitrines. Participants, identified only by first name, include shopkeepers, artisans, gondoliers, students, retirees, and cultural professionals. The project, curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate and organized by BAM under the patronage of the Municipality of Venice, transforms individual memories and everyday objects into an immersive installation.A complementary section at the Venetian Pavilion focuses on creatives, in dialogue with the exhibition Persistent Notes and the 61st Venice Biennale. The project continues the Kabakovs’ nearly fifty-year engagement with Venice.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Venetian Diary / Ca’ Tron, Venice (Italy), May 5, 2026.

Press text (excerpt):

Three years after the passing of Ilya Kabakov, Venice pays homage to one of the most significant artistic duos on the international stage with Venetian Diary, a monumental and participatory project conceived by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. The result of their shared vision, the work places at its center the stories, memories, and objects of Venetians, offering an intense collective self-portrait of the city while reaffirming the poetic and conceptual force that has established the duo as seminal figures in contemporary art.

Presented in conjunction with the 61st Venice Biennale, the project, curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate, unfolds as a dialogue between the city and the Biennale across two sites: the main floor of Ca’ Tron, a sixteenth-century palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal, and the Venetian Pavilion at the Giardini, as part of the exhibition Persistent Notes, curated by Giovanna Zabotti with Denis Isaia and Cesare Biasini Selvaggi.

From May 9 to June 28, 2026, the exhibition—organized by BAM under the patronage of the Municipality of Venice—transforms Ca’ Tron into a vast narrative and relational apparatus. This is not a show about Venice, but a show with Venice.

The protagonists are approximately 550 inhabitants of the metropolitan area of Venice, spanning generations, social backgrounds, and urban contexts. Each participant was invited to write a diary entry recounting their relationship with the city and to contribute a personal object symbolically representing that bond. Fragments of lives—memories, desires, nostalgia, and aspirations—are displayed in museum-style vitrines, forming a layered and unexpected human mosaic, suspended between past and future and organized into thematic sections. Participants include shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, artisans, retirees, homemakers, athletes, students, gondoliers, creatives, cultural professionals, maritime workers, restaurateurs, members of historic families, journalists, public servants, and representatives of different religious communities.

The project places at its center those Venetians who never appear on the red carpet yet sustain the city through their daily work and presence. The selection reflects the social complexity of Venice: children, the elderly, newcomers, and long-established families responded to a public open call, transforming the Kabakovs’ invitation into a collective and democratic gesture. The artists and curators chose to identify each contribution by first name only, underscoring the equal importance of every story—and, by extension, of every individual—without hierarchy.

Displayed in a series of thematic vitrines and accompanied by participants’ narratives, the collected objects—tools, mementos, and traces of everyday life—become true “resonance chambers” of existence.

In continuity with the Kabakovs’ poetics and their celebrated total installations, the work takes the form of an immersive environment in which the individual dimension intertwines with the collective. The city is not a stage but living matter; Venetians are not extras but protagonists. The gesture is both simple and radical: to place the individual at the center, recognizing them as custodians of a heritage that is not only historical, cultural, and artistic, but fundamentally human.

A complementary component of the project is presented within the Venetian Pavilion, in dialogue with Persistent Notes and in resonance with the curatorial vision of the 2026 Art Biennale. Here, the section entrusted to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov focuses on a specific group: creatives. Their objects—charged with memory and symbolic of personal and artistic trajectories—become gestures of recognition toward those who contribute to the ongoing redefinition of cultural identity in a city that hosts one of the most significant art events in the world.

The project marks the latest and most intense chapter in a nearly fifty-year relationship between the Kabakovs and Venice.

They are in Venice again, but this time with a premiere: For the first time, Les Innombrables adopted a non-performance. In a public statement, the Swiss art collective expressed their gratitude to the Seaworld Venice team of the Austrian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale that according to the information sign in front of the closed pavilion “consists of individuals of more than 17 different nationalities”. “This non-performance is exactly what we were looking for throughout our whole career. Now we’ve finally found a suitable work we can adopt”, said their speaker. They didn’t want to further comment as they were too busy sipping their Spritz. Who would blame them?

Les Innombrables are known since the 1990s for “seizing” or “found” realities/performances/installations in art-fair contexts, like their past works at Frieze LA 2019, Art Basel Miami, Venice Biennale, etc..

Les Innombrables: Austrian Seaworld Pavili-Non / Austrian Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Giardini, Venice (Italy), May 8, 2026.

Official description: Comigo ninguém pode, a plant popularity known in Brazil, is the title of the exhibition that brings into dialogue, through an unexpected composition, two contemporary artists working on the performative rewriting of colonial histories: Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão. Comigo ninguém pode comes from the Portuguese name for the plant known in English as dumb cane or leopard lily (Dieffenbachia) – a species widely at the entrances of houses in Brazil as a symbol of spiritual protection. The ambiguity and syncretism of the term, which also became a popular saying, can be understood as “Nobody can defeat me” or “Don’t mess with me!”, meanings that allude to the plant’s toxicity.

By evoking this energy, Comigo ninguém pode invites a shift in perception, opening the possibility of seeing the transcendent within the visible. It reflects on the manifestation of faith and spirituality within Brazilian culture, highlighting its close relationship with nature and more-than-human realms.

The exhibition adopts an installation-based approach and features commissioned, historical and previously unseen works, alongside new large-scale pieces. The project offers a visceral call-and-response on how spirituality and nature can shape a public imagination that rewrites history and re-signifies colonial ruins and wounds through fantastic and magical beings.

This is Germany’s pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is titled “Ruin”, the exhibiting artists are Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann. Ruin / German Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2026. Venice (Italy), May 8, 2026.

Official description: In Ruin, phantom spaces of East German history, such as the vanished GDR pavilion, the demolished Palace of the Republic and the burning Sunflower House – the site of racially motivated riots in Rostock in 1992 – serve as curatorial blueprints to address how historical gaps create “zones of broken time” that can be reconfigured through artistic resistance.

Sung Tieu envelops the pavilion’s neoclassical façade in a trompe-l’oeil mosaic. The image alludes to the ruins of a socialist-era prefabricated apartment block on Gehrenseestraße in Berlin – the artist’s childhood home and a housing complex for Vietnamese contract workers in East Germany, later inhabited by various migrant communities after reunification. Shifting from illusion to testimony, the work implicates the artist’s own biography while tracing the historical continuities of state control and surveillance regimes.

Henrike Naumann reflects on socio-political issues through interior design, exploring the friction between political opinions, taste and personal everyday aesthetics. Her immersive installation melds references to post-war Germany, the GDR pavilion, and the East German “baseball bat years” of the 1990s into an “archaeological prehistory of the present”, in which East Germany becomes an internal front, a border that will not disappear.