Pierre Huyghe and Jean-Luc Moulène are participating in the group exhibition BUT I WORLD I SEE YOU at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, as part of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg.

The opening chapter deciphers (sepulchral) landscapes and culture of obsolescence imbued with historical memories and informed by personal experience, myth, and ideology, or how significance affects the images’ overall latent meanings. It will present photographs, sculpture, 16mm film and video such as Pierre Huyghe, Henry Fox Talbot, Henri Becquerel, On Kawara, Paul Graham, among others.

The series of photographs Dance for Radium, Loïe Fuller for Marie Curie, The Artist’s Institute, New York (2014) by Pierre Huyghe documents a performance that took place at the Artist’s Institute in New York on February 20, 2014, during Pierre Huyghe’s solo exhibition. For the occasion, Huyghe conceived Dance for Radium, a phosphorescent costume developed in reference to the dress originally created by Loïe Fuller in 1904. Worn by curator Jenny Jaskey, the dress was activated through a performance of Radium Dance, a work by Fuller that was never documented and survives only through written testimony. Fuller’s original costume was developed in Marie Curie’s laboratory and incorporated phosphorescent salts, allowing her figure to glow in the dark.

The exhibition’s second chapter explores how artists such as Jean-Luc Moulène, Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Hamilton, Marcel Broodthaers among others use drop shadows, optical devices, artefacts and photographic appropriation to record the states of forms and to serve as a matrix, a constitutive vehicle for the organization of ideas, for an ecology of attention.

Taking inspiration from Man Ray's rayographs, Jean-Luc Moulène's Spores are created by transferring natural fungal matter directly onto paper, like an imprint of what the artist calls "the seat of gravity."

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