Pierre Huyghe’s Animals, Machines, and Architecture

Huyghe has trained an entire building to breathe and hold scars — not to house the show, but to become it.

I. The Hum

Walking into the galleries at Fondation Beyeler, the first thing you notice isn't any single work. It's a low, sustained hum.

Following it leads past a glass door in constant flux, fogging itself, then clearing again. Further in, a coiled silicone organ submerged in water rises and falls on something close to a breathing rhythm, occasionally holding still. The sound isn't coming from any one film or sculpture; it travels along the walls, through holes drilled between the galleries. The whole building seems wired into a single breathing system.

This is Pierre Huyghe's first solo museum exhibition in Switzerland, curated by Mouna Mekouar and Anne Stenne, running through 13 September. Across eight galleries in the Renzo Piano building, sixteen works span 2011 to 2026, several of them new commissions made for this space.

What matters isn't what each of these works depicts on its own. It's how, together, they change what the building is doing.

II. No Neutral Backdrop

Museums usually build themselves into a neutral container — white walls, constant light, legible circulation — so the architecture recedes and the work stays in front. What Huyghe does at Fondation Beyeler is cancel that division of labor.

Here, the walls carry air and sound; the glass doors change transparency with the breathing; old exhibition paint is drilled back out of the walls; pigment on the floor gets carried elsewhere by visitors. The building doesn't just hold the works — it transmits effects between them, stores traces, and changes.

So the show isn't making a vague claim that "everything is alive." It's making a more specific one: that architecture, animals, machines, and images can form a single system acting on each other, in which nothing is naturally the protagonist and nothing is confined to background.

If you want the theoretical version: they're placed on the same ontological footing — no presumed hierarchy between the biological, the mechanical, the architectural, and the fictional.

III. The Building Becomes a Participant

The most direct evidence is Apnea (2026). An artificial silicone organ submerged in water rises and falls on a disrupted breathing pattern; the air and sound it produces travel through holes drilled in the walls into neighboring galleries, and cloud a nearby liquid-crystal glass door in sync.

Alchimia (2026) extends the same system further — a worm-like soft-robotic form at a doorway that hums with the airflow and convulses whenever Apnea's breath is interrupted. The two works aren't linked because they share a theme; they're physically wired together — one work's held breath becomes another work's bodily reaction.

The building, here, functions like a circulatory system moving air, sound, and motion.

Two other works aren't about breath at all — they're about how the building stores and spreads traces. Timekeeper (2026) cores directly through the museum's own repainted walls, exposing accumulated layers of paint left by past exhibitions; Light Dust (2026) spreads pigment and cast light across the entire floor of the show, letting color cross the boundary of any single work and keep moving on visitors' shoes.

The air is real air. The cores pulled from the walls are real building material. The pigment tracked out the door is real pigment. When people call the building "alive," what they're pointing to, first, are changes a visitor can observe and check for themselves — not an atmosphere manufactured by wall text.

IV. The Mask, Twelve Years Later

It's inside this system that the reappearance of Untitled (Human Mask) (2014) takes on new meaning.

Its protagonist is Fuku-chan, a macaque trained as waitstaff at a thatched-roof sake house north of Tokyo. Huyghe filmed her there after the March 2011 Fukushima meltdown had emptied the restaurant, and designed her mask himself, drawing on the logic of Japanese Noh theatre.

A Noh mask is normally something an actor chooses to put on, distilling a character into one fixed face. Fuku-chan could neither choose the role nor take the mask off. Her trained gestures read as almost human, but the mask cuts off any way of reading her expression — and the harder a viewer tries to see "humanity" in her, the clearer it becomes that the reading might just be a human projection onto an animal.

In 2014, critic Jennifer Higgie called the mask "the embodiment of anthropomorphism at its most seductive and cruel." That judgment matters not just because the mask covers the monkey's face, but because the work exposes a power relation: who has the authority to assign another living thing a role, and who gets to explain its behavior.

Twelve years later, Human Mask has been placed inside a building that has likewise been given gestures, rhythms, and responses. The monkey was trained; the glass door follows a program; the soft-robotic worm responds to airflow; the galleries have been arranged by the artist to behave as though they breathe.

The two obviously aren't equivalent. A building has no animal capacity for suffering or will, and the animal isn't ordinary material inside an exhibition mechanism. But the juxtaposition forces a question: when we read motion, response, and continuous change as signs of "life," are we discovering a subject — or watching a system someone designed?

There's also a fainter thread running through more than a decade of Huyghe's practice. In Human Mask (2014), the body already existed, and the artist added a face and a role onto it. In the work that follows, the order reverses: a role, a way of perceiving, a way of behaving, can be built first, and the body becomes only a temporary vessel for it.

V. Another Mask

In the galleries, a performer in black costuming and a gold mask sits motionless on the floor at first, then slowly rises and starts to walk. This is Huyghe's Idiom (2024). The costume was designed with Bottega Veneta and its creative director at the time, Matthieu Blazy; its fluid contours blur gender and push the wearer's specific identity into the background. What a visitor sees first is still a person, but as the eye moves between costume, gait, and mask, it becomes hard to say quickly who is actually directing this performance.

Making sense of the work means shifting attention from the performer to the mask. The mask here isn't just a prop that hides a face and hands the figure an identity; it's wired into a sensing-and-translation system. Sound, temperature, faces, and shifts in the space are read and converted into voice, phoneme, syntax, and light. The gallery becomes more than somewhere a performer passes through — it's an environment continually feeding input into that system, and a visitor's own presence may become part of what it senses changing.

That input isn't organized into a message waiting for a visitor to understand. The language the work produces is closer to an expressive system that keeps generating itself as the environment shifts. We can tell it's responding to what's around it, without necessarily knowing what it's responding to, let alone what its own expressions mean to it. Sensing, expression, and understanding no longer line up here as one continuous chain.

Looking back at Human Mask from here makes the relationship between the two works clear. In Human Mask, an animal is placed inside a costume, a setting, and a role arranged by humans, and the mask pushes us to read a human bearing onto it. Idiom turns that relationship around: underneath the mask is a human body, but the sensing and expression the work directs our attention toward happen in the mask and the system it's wired into. The first makes an animal look human; the second makes a human body the support structure for something unfamiliar.

Normally we assume the performer gives the mask its life — the human senses, judges, and acts, and the mask presents an image. Idiom takes functions that would usually sit together in one person and splits them apart. The legs do the walking, the body carries the weight of costume and mask, the environment supplies constantly changing information, and a sensing system reads that information and converts it into expression. The performer is still indispensable, but no longer the sole center for understanding the work.

That doesn't mean the mask has become an independent life of its own. It means the work leaves "who is sensing, who is expressing, who is acting" without one clear answer. The human body becomes, for the duration, the condition that lets another system enter the space and touch its environment. Huyghe's question turns concrete here: if sensing, action, and body can belong to different parts, where does a subject actually begin — and what gives us the right to treat those parts as one and the same existence?

Other works in the show carry this splitting and recombining to different scales.

Cambrian Explosion 19 (2013) sets live horseshoe crabs and anemones beside a volcanic rock rigged to look weightless. Life and rock share the same scene while carrying different kinds of time: the organisms keep moving, while the rock evokes a geological process that runs far beyond any single lifespan. Where attention lands keeps shifting, between the living things, the material, and the setting they together form.

Camata (2024) turns a human body into a different kind of presence. In the Atacama Desert, a group of machines performs a sequence of actions around a skeleton. The skeleton is evidence that a person once existed, but it offers no explanation for what the machines are doing. Those actions might read as close to ritual, or as simply the execution of a program; a visitor can never quite settle which. The film is also continuously re-edited in real time by sensors in the room, so the action filmed in the desert stays connected to what's changing in the gallery right now — the way the footage is organized was never fixed once filming ended.

Adversary (2026) turns an image reconstructed from a brain-computer-interface experiment into an aluminium bas-relief. From brain activity, to a reconstructed image, to a metal surface with weight, the work leaves a whole chain of translation sitting inside the material. The relief can't simply be read as consciousness made visible; it also raises the question of how much of what we end up seeing comes from perception, and how much is shaped by the technology that reconstructed it.

None of these works simply repeats the claim that "the building breathes." Each instead unsettles a relationship we might otherwise take for granted — between life and material, ritual and program, consciousness and image. The building holds and connects these relationships: it's the space the works sit in, and in some of them, it also becomes an environment that's sensed, and that takes part in how the work changes.

Liminals, anchoring the central gallery, pulls these scattered questions together onto a single character. The fifty-minute film is built from photogrammetric scans of bodies and landscapes, rendered through a game engine. Its protagonist is a hollow, faceless figure with no human original to trace back to and no fixed body.

It's worth separating where the scans come from from who the figure actually is. The work draws on data from real bodies and landscapes, but this figure isn't anyone's digital stand-in. Reality supplies the material it's made of, without handing over a life story that transfers directly onto it. It's closer to an invention made of scan data, fictional premise, and computation: it has a human outline, but can't be explained by any one person's experience, personality, or memory.

From Human Mask to Idiom to Liminals, the link between body and identity keeps loosening. In Human Mask, we can still make out the animal under the mask, just placed inside a human role. In Idiom, a human body is combined with a system's own sensing and expression. By Liminals, the character no longer corresponds to any whole body that existed before the image. The body itself becomes something that has to be continually constructed.

But watching doesn't stop because of this. Even as the figure keeps changing, we may still take what appears before and after as "the same thing," and even try to read intention or feeling into its states. This is where Liminals's question sits: when the body is no longer fixed, and there's no human biography guaranteeing continuity of identity, what exactly do we go on to recognize it by? Is a figure's simply continuing to appear enough to make us believe it has some kind of interior life?

This also lets Liminals echo the show's spatial organization as a whole. In Idiom, a temporary subject forms out of the coordination between a human body, the mask's system, and the gallery environment; in Liminals, that same process of formation moves inside the character itself. A subject doesn't necessarily exist whole beforehand and then get placed into an environment. It may instead gradually take on an outline, and just as readily change it, through the ongoing action of material, program, space, and being watched.

VI. A Room With No Authoritative Explanation

The critical disagreement over this show comes down to one question: how much explanation does it actually owe a visitor?

One view holds that the show's real strength is its restraint. Breath, sound, and material change aren't in a hurry to state their meaning; they let visitors gradually notice the connections between works. The opposing view holds that the wall text can't carry the show's complexity, and that even with a room-by-room booklet, visitors can't tell which connections come from an actual mechanism and which are simply asserted by curatorial language.

This split isn't a curatorial argument happening outside the work. It's the direct consequence of the show's own claim.

If walls, animals, machines, and images can all take part in producing meaning, and if nothing in the room is naturally more real than anything else, then there's no longer an obvious authoritative voice left to explain everything else. The show gains openness from this, but takes on a matching risk: refusing a clean explanation can free up how a work is seen — or it can become cover for relationships between works that were never actually built out.

Animal ethics exposes the limit of this logic most directly. Huyghe's own word for it is "cohabitation," but the term doesn't automatically dissolve the fact that ants and horseshoe crabs are being organized and displayed by an institution. They're still brought into a museum, placed in a specific setting, and kept under continuous observation.

The question, then, isn't whether these animals can give consent the way a person would. It's whether "cohabitation" actually changes the fact of how they're organized and displayed, or simply gives that fact a better name. If it doesn't, then dissolving the hierarchy between human and non-human may be happening only in the show's theoretical description — not in who actually holds the power to decide.

VII. A Second Body

Twelve years ago, Human Mask concentrated its question onto one monkey and one fixed face: when an animal is trained to look recognizably human, what are we actually seeing — the animal, or a role we've projected onto it?

The works that follow keep taking that question apart. Idiom gives the mask its own way of sensing the world, while still borrowing a human body to act through it. Liminals goes further and removes even a traceable human original. Here, "life," "subject," and "interior life" no longer attach to any one kind of material, and can no longer be confirmed by a face, a body, or a particular kind of intelligence alone.

At Fondation Beyeler, these works enter a still larger system. Air moves through the walls, glass changes transparency, a machine convulses in response, old paint surfaces from inside the walls, and new pigment gets carried off by visitors. The building is no longer just a venue that shows Human Mask, Idiom, or Liminals — it becomes a second body that explains itself alongside them.

That doesn't mean the building has actually acquired the same kind of life as an animal, or that a machine has acquired the same subjecthood as a person.

What the show does more usefully is let these different kinds of existence overlap briefly and uncomfortably in how they're watched: the monkey's gestures come from training, the building's breath comes from mechanical devices, Idiom's voice comes from a sensing-and-translation system, and the digital figure's changes come from computation — yet we still can't help looking for will, continuity, and a world we can't fully see from outside.

Huyghe hasn't proven that these things share one kind of life. What he's actually changed is where the viewer's question comes from.

We're no longer standing outside the work, judging what's alive, what's artificial, and what's merely a container. We're already inside a building that shapes judgment, carries a response, and keeps a trace of having been watched.

Installation view "Pierre Huyghe", Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2026 © Pierre Huyghe, represented by ProLitteris (CH) / ADAGP (FR)

Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask, 2014, film still. Collection Maja Hoffmann / Luma Foundation. © Pierre Huyghe, represented by ProLitteris (CH) / ADAGP (FR)

Pierre Huyghe, Camata, 2024, film still. Collection Maja Hoffmann / Luma Foundation. © Pierre Huyghe, represented by ProLitteris (CH) / ADAGP (FR)

Pierre Huyghe, Liminals, 2025, film still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation. Collection of LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist, LAS Art Foundation, and Hartwig Art Foundation; Galerie Chantal Crousel; Marian Goodman Gallery; Hauser & Wirth; Esther Schipper; TARO NASU; and Anna Lena Films, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe, represented by ProLitteris (CH) / ADAGP (FR)

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