French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe has unveiled a new immersive exhibition at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, transforming the museum into what he describes as a “soulscape.” On view through 13 September, the exhibition brings together new films, sound installations, living organisms and sculptural environments that continue Huyghe’s long-standing exploration of perception, speculative fiction and the boundaries between human and non-human worlds.
Widely recognised for creating large-scale experiential installations presented at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and unconventional cultural venues, Huyghe reimagines Fondation Beyeler as a sequence of interconnected environments where fiction, biology and technology continuously intersect.
Living Installations Blur Reality and Fiction
The exhibition unfolds through a series of immersive spaces that challenge conventional distinctions between the living and the artificial. Throughout the galleries, ants emerge from wall openings while masked figures occupy isolated corners, creating shifting encounters that prompt visitors to question perception and reality.
Meanwhile, a newly developed work titled Apnea functions as an artificial breathing organ, establishing a rhythmic connection across the exhibition. Its continuous respiration creates a shared atmosphere linking films, sound works, installations and living organisms into a single evolving environment.
Visitors also encounter Liminals, Huyghe’s latest film, which the artist describes as an “incessant dance of matter” in which “every moment is a maybe.” Elsewhere, Alchima appears as a breathing, humming “larval ancestor” positioned between gallery spaces. At the same time, Light Dust suspends coloured particles in the air, preserving a fleeting moment across surrounding walls, floors and ceilings.
Pierre Huyghe Continues His Exploration of Speculative Worlds
Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the exhibition invites audiences to move through a constantly shifting landscape where metaphysical ideas coexist with biological processes and imagined realities. Consequently, each installation functions as both an independent artwork and part of a larger speculative ecosystem.
Huyghe has consistently explored these themes throughout his multidisciplinary practice, using moving images, architecture, ecology and living systems to create environments that evolve rather than remain fixed objects.
“Fictions are vehicles that give us access to other possible worlds, to a counterfactual imagination,” the artist expressed. “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 exhibition is now on view at Fondation Beyeler through 13 September, offering visitors an immersive encounter with one of contemporary art’s most influential voices. Through its integration of film, sound, living organisms and speculative environments, the presentation reinforces Huyghe’s position at the forefront of experimental installation art while expanding the dialogue between contemporary art, science and imagination.