EXH 010         L‘Expédition Scintillante         Pierre Huyghe         2002

Header image: Kunsthaus Bregenz © Pierre Huyghe, Kunsthaus Bregenz
Text I: after Fanny Brandauer | Landschaft ausstellen. Über den Transfer von Landschaft in den Innenraum (2018), p. 74, 78, 80
Text II: after Kunsthaus Bregenz

In 2002 the Kunsthaus Bregenz showed the exhibition L'Expédition Scintillante by Pierre Huyghe. Huyghe transformed the three floors of the museum into individual acts of a musical journey. In interaction with light and sound installations, a stringent story about a fictional expedition to Antarctica was told — following an exact script and carried by sensual impressions. The element of water in its various states of aggregation served as a central theme in the exhibition. With technical perfection ephemeral natural phenomena such as ice, fog, snow and rain were transferred into the interior of the museum.

On the first floor, at the beginning of the expedition, there is a large ice ship, the melting process of which is documented photographically and can only be experienced in the form of pictures a few days after the opening. At the same time, a video can be seen showing excerpts from various films that shaped our conception of adventure travel and research expeditions.
In the center of the second floor there is a light box that reminds of a concert situation or a machine for making contact, similar to the one with which extraterrestrials send mysterious sound and light signals to earth in Steven Spielberg's »Close Encounters of the Third Kind«.
On the third floor, a black ice surface and a book – a program booklet for a musical in three acts – make it possible to recapitulate the imaginative journey. In the shaded exhibition space, the black ice surface serves as a kind of negative, a projection stage for a musical, for which the accompanying program booklet provides the specifications.

© Pierre Huyghe

First floor, All following images © Pierre Huyghe, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Second floor

Third floor

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