Pierre Huyghe is a master of inventing narratives about non-human agents. In his work, entities don’t just appear in the frame; they live and act—robots, mycelium, an ape in a human mask, plants and bacteria, a humanoid figure with a hole instead of a face… It’s unsettling, captivating, and technically astonishing.
Pierre Huyghe. Frame from the video «Untitled (Human Mask), ” 2014.
Pierre Huyghe works with themes from ecology, anthropology, and memory studies, but he does so in a way that diverges from most artists: he does not sharpen the «edges» of conflict, but rather softens them. His projects are sensually specific, unforgettable even if you view individual frames rather than the complete video. Yet, conveying the artist’s message through language proves quite difficult—the art is too exquisite to be discussed in the «rough language» of an ideological manifesto.
Pierre Yuig. Frame from the video «Kamata,» 2024
It seems to me that the goal of these works lies in this gesture of breaking away from human vision. By forcing us to look at the world through «non-human» eyes—be it a chimpanzee in a mask, a robot’s gaze, or a neural network’s—Yuig doesn’t just discover a boundary; they invite us to cross it entirely. This step leads beyond history, where neither time, nor observer, nor observed remains, but only pure perception, liberated from biological and cultural assumptions.
