PIERRE HUYGHE NYMPHÉAS TRANSPLANT (14 – 18) | Page 4

AQUARIUM SERIES: OVERVIEW
Begun in 2010, Pierre Huyghe’s aquarium project brings together a number of important
motifs in the artist’s oeuvre, including his preoccupation with time, the figure of the
explorer (both as real and as fictional figure), and his investigation of exhibition practices.
The aquarium series can be seen as a precursor to Huyghe’s most celebrated project,
Untilled, for dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012, which blurred boundaries between human
beings and animals; art and nature.
Each unique, his aquariums are mysterious self-referential worlds. The series includes
both saltwater and fresh water aquariums, with environments that range from near
self-sustaining ecosystems to systems that require human care and maintenance.
Each comprises a distinct cast of characters—fish, hermit crabs, arrow crabs and tube
anemones for instance—some of which are creatures whose direct ancestors are more
than 500 million years old. Huyghe houses the creatures in landscapes made from
aquatic plants, red lava, volcanic rock, sand and sometimes, unnatural or unexpected
materials. Each aquarium has a distinct atmosphere, generated by the selection of
inhabitants, the formal relationships between the elements of the aquatic landscapes,
and by the lighting.
Like the scenarios in which Huyghe assembles human participants, such as the open,
improvised situations that formed the narrative of his film The Host and the Cloud
(2009–10), observers of his aquariums become witnesses to real events that take place
in a parallel world, often a world where the rules may not be immediately understood.
The worlds Huyghe creates in the aquariums are precise and concrete, but also poetic
and expa