Opening on May 24th, 2026, at Fondation Beyeler, the first Swiss museum solo exhibition devoted to Pierre Huyghe immerses visitors in a volatile environment where fiction bleeds into reality. Running through September 13th, 2026, the exhibition brings together immersive installations that probe perception, consciousness, and artificial intelligence in art through systems that behave more like living habitats than fixed artworks.
Created specifically for the Fondation Beyeler, the presentation weaves together film, sound, light, biological organisms, objects, and machine-learning technologies into a constantly shifting sensory landscape. Voices, images, and rhythms drift between harmony and rupture, forming what Huyghe describes as a speculative “soulscape” shaped by overlapping temporalities and unstable states of existence.
Hybrid beings and the dissolving boundary between human and non-human
For decades, Huyghe has challenged the conventions of exhibition-making by constructing environments that evolve independently over time. His practice fuses cinema, organic processes, digital systems, and material forms into open-ended worlds where the viewer becomes part of the experience itself.
The Basel exhibition deepens this approach through newly conceived works shown alongside key projects from recent years. Living organisms, responsive technologies, algorithmic systems, and moving images continuously alter the atmosphere of the space, creating environments that never fully settle. Central to the exhibition is Huyghe’s fascination with hybrid beings—entities suspended between biological life and artificial intelligence, matter and simulation.
Huyghe creates situations that evolve and generate new relationships in real time. Environmental shifts, biological cycles and machine learning processes continually reshape the experience, placing visitors within a world of uncertainty and perpetual change.
Artificial intelligence in art as an evolving ecosystem
Widely regarded as one of contemporary art’s most influential interdisciplinary artists, Huyghe has long explored artificial intelligence in dialogue with organic and ecological systems. Earlier works such as A Journey That Wasn’t, Untilled, After ALife Ahead, and Liminal introduced worlds populated by algae, bees, augmented-reality systems, aquariums, and algorithmic entities.
In Basel, those investigations expand into a site-specific environment with no single narrative or stable centre. Sound, movement, digital intelligence, and physical matter interact unpredictably, producing a constantly changing network of relations. The exhibition asks how human and non-human forms of intelligence might coexist, and how technological systems continue to reshape perception, identity, and presence.
For Huyghe, fiction becomes a mechanism for approaching alternate realities and imagining unfamiliar forms of existence. His works remain deliberately unfinished — open systems that continue evolving alongside the people and environments that encounter them.
