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December 19, 2018 – Review
Pierre Huyghe’s “UUmwelt”
Flora Katz
Five large, freestanding LED panels fill the spaces of the Serpentine. Despite their technological nature, they look like temporary plaster walls and give the rooms a stripped appearance. Images scroll onscreen at high speed. In the darkened exhibition space, they have peculiar light and colors, cold and clear tones. Sounds can be heard, but like the shapes on the panels, I don’t know what they relate to: A microphone? A bird? Nothing corresponds to anything entirely; the sounds oscillate between machine, human, and animal. The same is true of the strange scent diffused in the air. Dust clings to viewers’ shoes. It will spread to the gardens, the streets, the tube. It comes from a large mural on the wall of the main room, a version of timekeeper (1999). Timekeeper is an archeology of the place, a mural that looks like the impression of the rings on a tree trunk, made by sanding down the wall of the exhibition space, each layer of exposed paint forming a different color circle. Here, the same sanding process is at play but it forms sinuous lines, like a map of an unknown territory. Flies roam overhead. They were born in the gallery’s ceiling, …