While staying in Basel for a month this summer, I took the tram up to the Fondation Beyeler exactly two times. The first was on May 25, the last day to see the museum’s Cezanne exhibition. The Cezannes were beautiful, though not quite my kind of thing. After wading through the crowd of fellow museum-goers, many of whom had hopped across the border from France to Switzerland to catch a final glimpse of the Mont Sainte-Victoire studies, I found myself face-to-face with a mysterious, empty-looking gallery. That is, empty-looking at first, until I saw the ants.
As it turns out, the last day of the Cezanne exhibit was also the second day of the Beyeler’s exhibition of works by Pierre Huyghe, a French contemporary artist whose surreal works blur the boundaries between the organic and the artificial. Upon entering the exhibition, one encounters ants that live inside a white museum wall panel, only becoming visible to the viewer when they crawl in and out of a tiny hole at eye level. The rest of the room, spacious and dimly lit, feels uncomfortably blank, save for a glass, portal-like panel that fluctuates between opaquely white and completely transparent, allowing one to see into other parts of the gallery.
The ominous blankness of the exhibition continues throughout, building a tension that never breaks. Huyghe’s films loop in pitch-black rooms, starring an eerie cast of characters. In one film, a nude, pallid woman wanders a barren landscape, a gaping void where facial features should be. Another shows a monkey in a child’s clothes and a human mask, abandoned in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 and wandering a deserted sake house, all the while mimicking the behavior it once observed in the human shopowners. Reemerging from the cavern-like screening rooms, one encounters a series of large glass tanks filled with water, each containing a giant, buoyant piece of volcanic rock that appears unnaturally suspended in midair. At the bottom of one tank, live crustaceans scuttle along. In another, a silicone-encased soft robot breathes in and out, mimicking a pair of human lungs. At times, air wooshes from tiny holes in the white walls of the exhibition, often syncing up with the robot. It’s as if Huyghe created an uncanny creature out of glass, plaster, and carpet, inviting visitors to step inside the chambers of its cold, empty heart.
Compared to the rest of the exhibition, the last room feels much more open. It’s similarly empty, though visitors seem to linger here, watching a film projected on one wall or looking at the various objects strewn around the room. A giant metal sheet with a line down its middle divides the room in two, creating an ominous gateway to nowhere. In one corner sits a gold mask dotted with pinpoints of light, which supposedly learns to “speak” through a machine learning model trained on how visitors interact with the gallery. Upon reading this description on the wall, I felt my stomach turn. I stood in front of the mask for a while, challenging it to make a sound, but I didn’t hear a peep. Maybe it hadn’t been training for long enough.
Though I tried to convince myself that the mask was surely training on something innocuous, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the exhibition had been watching me the entire time. Just when I thought I couldn’t get more unnerved, I found myself face-to-face with a silicone robotic worm on my way out. It slithered on the carpet, lifting and turning its head as if reacting to my movements, almost close enough for me to reach out and push it away. As with the mask, I stood and played chicken until I realized the ridiculousness of the situation. I sheepishly backed away, letting the next visitor take a selfie with the worm.
After these unsettling encounters, I don’t know exactly what possessed me to return to the Beyeler a few weeks later, close to the end of my stay in Basel. Perhaps it was a morbid curiosity about whether the exhibition had learned something in my absence, or maybe I just wanted to duke it out with the worm one last time. All I know is that when I entered the exhibition again, it was mostly the same. I indeed did have a completely different experience this time, though perhaps it was I who had changed. Other visitors tiptoed around, as if anticipating a jumpscare around the corner, but for me the suspense had worn off along with the novelty. I smiled at the ants in the first room, almost relieved that they were still alive and well-fed. Under the shade of the volcanic rock, the crustaceans still traversed the sandy bottom of their tank, but I gazed at them fondly before hovering my hand over the wall to feel the exhibition breathe. This time, the mask made a timid, garbled noise, eliciting a startled laugh from me. Though it made me uneasy, I wondered how much it had truly learned if that was the extent of its communication after observing thousands of visitors for weeks on end.
In the final corridor, I waved to the worm. Then I left the exhibition with a surprisingly full heart, as if I had said my final goodbyes to an elusive, still-mysterious creature.
