A site-specific installation about the development of cancer cells by the French artist Pierre Huyghe is becoming a major talking point of Tino Sehgal’s exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Located in the contemporary art centre’s basement, Living/Cancer/Variator (2016) consists of a pool of water, leaking pipes, flickering lights, a moving escalator, spiders, ants and flies. The level of activity influences the growth of in-vitro human cancer cells, and the speed of the cells’ growth in turn influences the installation’s evolution.
“What interested me was making something that could manifest itself in the body of the building, this notion of illness and this blind human presence which is subjected to changes in the environment,” says Huyghe, who used an actor infected with a flu virus for his exhibition Influants at the Berlin-based Esther Schipper gallery in 2011.
Sensors capture the temperature and levels of oxygen and bacteria in the installation and the rooms where Sehgal’s pieces Ann Lee and This Variation are performed, and transmit the data to an incubator. Inside the incubator are hela cells—human cancer cells grown from those taken in 1951 from a patient, Henrietta Lacks, which are commonly used in scientific research. The data transmitted from the sensors affect how quickly or slowly the cells multiply.
“We have a sensor within the incubator which captures the variation of the cancer’s development,” Huyghe says. This algorithm is transmitted back to the Palais de Tokyo’s water and ventilation systems. “So it’s a dynamic feedback.”
Huyghe has long worked on micro-universes and living organisms. For Documenta in 2013, he created Untilled, featuring a dog, a compost heap and a reclining nude sculpture whose head was obscured by a beehive.
