Pierre Huyghe

A pale tetra fish swims around a vast obsidian tank, while another bobs on its side at the top of the water, perhaps ailing from debilitating swim bladder disease (Circadian Dilemma [El Día del Ojo], 2017).

- Sean Burns

Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy

Nearby, Zoodram 6 (2013) consists of a smaller container in which a hermit crab lumbers under the heavy weight of its shell: a hollowed-out, resin version of Constantin Brâncuși’s early modernist bronze Sleeping Muse (1910). The crab’s twitching antennae is seemingly the only one of its appendages able to move under the art-historical load on its back, both a protection and a burden.

Though other lifeforms creep around these rocky terrains, including arrow crabs and starfish, a strangely comforting sense of loneliness pervades Pierre Huyghe’s solo show, ‘Liminal’, (a collaboration with curator Anne Stenne) at Punta della Dogana, itself an isolated building on a blustery Venetian promontory. After reading the exhibition’s accompanying text, I learned that some of the tetras are blind, a genetic mutation resulting from their species living in underwater caves in Mexico for millions of years. The tank is fitted with switchable glass that responds to its surroundings, flitting between a view of illuminated rockery and complete darkness. All the details here feel carefully connected, but its living inhabitants do not.

The solitary creatures in Huyghe’s work prompt reflection on the responsibility of having a sentient body, of dealing with our unpredictable and instinctual minds. The nine connected rooms, organized over two floors, are either very sparsely lit or pitch black. Although when I visited, the show was busy, with a long queue out the front door, inside the space was hushed, as bodies shuffled around, occasionally colliding, much like the cave fish.