Highlights
It’s a rare joy to encounter immersive installations that truly activate space and affect the viewer both intellectually and viscerally. This spring, three standout New York exhibitions— Alicja Kwade at Pace, Anastasia Komar at Management, and Pierre Huyghe at Marian Goodman—do just that. Each exhibition envelops visitors in an environment that challenges the senses and pushes the boundaries of perception, while decentering the human’s place within it: Komar contemplates the primordial origins of life and the interconnectedness of all living things; Huyghe imagines a collaborative ecology where humans, animals, machines, and artificial intelligence co-create new realities; and Kwade abstracts away the human almost entirely, leaving behind only our systems for measuring and making as the scaffolding for a parallel, perhaps post-human world.
A sci-fi sensibility runs through all three exhibitions, as if each space is a portal to a parallel world or a speculative future. Crucially, sound is a central element in all three: the ticking of multiple clocks, the mumble of neural networks, and gentle, otherworldly music all work in concert with the visual, creating atmospheres that are as uncanny as they are enveloping. Ultimately, all three are contemplations on our humanity, achieved by stepping outside of it: they ask what it means to exist, to create, and to perceive, in a universe that is far stranger—and far less human-centered—than we might imagine.
Alicja Kwade at Pace (25th St), Telos Tales
May 7 – Aug 15, 2025
Alicja Kwade’s Telos Tales at Pace suggests a vision of a parallel reality where human constructs—measured time, architecture, material logic, and reasoning—operate by their own internal logic and rules. The gallery is transformed into an architectural-philosophical environment: giant geometric steel frames morph into tree-like bronze limbs, forming a skeletal structure that guides the viewers’ movement while making them acutely aware of their own presence. Suspended among these are mirror-chrome tubes containing clocks, their dashes endlessly reflected and distorted. The amplified ticking of these clocks forms an ambient soundtrack, heightening the installation’s sci-fi undertones.
The tension between nature and artificiality is striking: the installation evokes the logic of a natural environment, as if a new kind of nature is emerging from pure ideas and manufactured materials. Kwade’s reference to Aristotle’s causes grounds the work in a philosophy where the world is knowable through reason and observation, and where everything has a purpose—a “telos.” Yet here, the final cause remains absent, only hinted at in the exhibition’s title. The clock, usually a metaphor for time, is stripped of its narrative power: in this reality, nothing changes except the movement of its hands. Even as clocks are central, there is a paradoxical sense of timelessness, as if time has lost its grip and only its measurement remains.
Telos Tales immerses viewers in a world where frameworks and systems persist and evolve on their own terms, and the human is present only as a trace within the logic of things. The installation meditates on perception, purpose, and reasoning, suggesting that as long as questions like “meaning” and “time” are framed in human terms, they may remain unresolved.
Anastasia Komar at Management: LUCA
April 23–June 8, 2025
Anastasia Komar’s LUCA transforms the Management’s gallery into a glowing, otherworldly chamber, awash in red light. An ambient, gently evolving soundtrack—composed by Kamron Saniee in collaboration with the artist, completes the atmosphere and immersive feeling of the installation. Much of the gallery is filled up by a clear, inflatable bean-like form, and in front of it on the floor, a heavy tentacled sculpture unfurls, echoing the bean’s curves at their intersection. These two together—their lack of physical jointure lends an understated elegance—are LUCA: a primordial creature, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Its translucent body is connected to the walls by electric cables, suggesting a time-bending hybridity with technology or a digital life-support. Smaller “relatives” with feelers dot the walls, while paintings combine organic abstraction with chrome tentacles folding over the canvas. The immersive environment is heightened by this interplay of materials and forms, but the installation doesn’t seem to intend suspending disbelief; instead, it hovers between sincerity and a wry, sci-fi self-awareness. The exhibition is accompanied by a poetic text that invokes LUCA as the “mother and father” of all life, but here, this origin of life is fragile, even needy—confined and dependent, perhaps a reflection of our anthropomorphized longing to connect with the non-human. Komar’s LUCA lingers in this ambiguity, projecting a mesh of kinship and entanglement across life-forms—past, present, and future. At the same time, it exposes how even our most ambitious visions of the non-human remain tethered to the human. The result is an experience that is nostalgically sci-fi, slightly whimsical, and hauntingly poetic.
Pierre Huyghe at Marian Goodman, In Imaginal
May 6 –June 21, 2025
Pierre Huyghe’s In Imaginal is an immersive, shape-shifting ecosystem that places the viewer inside an expanded consciousness lab. In a dim gallery lit mostly by flickering screens, robotic devices, embodied artificial intelligences, alien-looking creatures, and digital simulations interact in unpredictable ways. A layered, evolving soundscape pulls the space together.
There is a sense that the exhibition deeply inhabits the fictional. The individual works conjure narratives of alternative worlds that feel both coherent and perpetually unsettled. Each piece—whether sculpture, two-sided screen, lamp-like device, or golden mask—acts as an anchor in a landscape in flux. At times, the viewer becomes a participant, disrupting and re-forming an ongoing experiment, their presence subtly influencing the evolving dynamics of the space.
In Imaginal is a multi-angle reflection on the radical decentralization of the human. Human, animal, and machine agencies are entangled in a network where no single actor is central. The psychological charge is hanging in the air: Huyghe taps into our most basic emotions and instincts—fear of the other, fascination, disgust, curiosity, wonder, and even boredom when faced with something out of reach. The show draws on the primal instinct of repulsion and the timely anxiety that AI is unstoppable, unhuman, and unpredictable. The works mutate, respond, and propagate, refusing to be pinned down by categories. It’s as if we’re eavesdropping on a conversation between chimeric creatures—part machine, part organism, part hallucination—whose logic we can’t fully access.
The resulting environment leaves the viewer with a lingering sense of wonder and unease, prompting contemplation on transformation, loss, a possible coexistence, and our place within a world increasingly more interconnected—and more alien—than we can fully comprehend.
About the writer: Vita Eruhimovitz is Los Angeles-based artist, and occasional curator and writer. Through her work, she navigates the tri-lingual mind and non-conceptual states of being. Vita’s background in science and technology inspire and inform her interest in the intersection of biological life and consciousness. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the San Diego Art Institute Museum, Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, Museum of Design Holon in Israel, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis. Her work is in private and public collections in the US and abroad. @vita_eruhimovitz
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