No man’s land …
In Pierre Huyghe’s exquisitely unsettling 19-minute film Human Mask from 2014, drone footage of Fukushima, decimated after the tsunami that led three nuclear plant reactors to meltdown in 2011, becomes an unspecified, post-apocalyptic, no man’s land.
Super furry animal …
Inside an empty restaurant, a creature seems to contemplate itself, its surrounds and its fate. Yet for profound reasons that go beyond the enigmatic set-up, we can never know what it thinks. Wearing a wistful take on a noh theatre mask and a blue uniform, it appears to be a girl: one whose fur-covered muscular physique moves with a combination of alien grace and shocking animalistic jerks.
Monkey magic …
The “actor” is a macaque monkey with a real day job in a Japanese restaurant, cast by the artist in a scenario that plays up the divide between human and animal consciousness. We are compelled to impose powerful feelings on to its blank “face”. Its dark eyes dart behind the mask’s slits. The monkey keeps its secrets.
Include in Animalesque: Art Across Species and Beings, BALTIC, Gateshead, to 19 April
