The brand new season at LUMA Arles kicked off in Could 2025 with three totally different exhibitions, all bookended by fog and clouds.
Silver Clouds, that’s, a piece by Andy Warhol that hovers over the heads of tourists to the exhibition ‘Sensing the Future: Experiments in Artwork and Expertise (E.A.T.)’. Warhol made the pillowy metallic objects within the Sixties, after the engineer Billy Klüver confirmed him a brand new materials known as Scotchpak, utilized by the US Military to maintain meals rations sizzling.
‘Sensing the Future: Experiments in Artwork and Expertise (E.A.T.)’
Klüver labored at Bell Phone Laboratories, generally referred to as Bell Labs, an industrial research-and-development firm that was as necessary then as Google is at present (Eero Saarinen designed its New Jersey facility, which you may recognise because the ‘Severance constructing’). In his spare time, Klüver collaborated with artists on multimedia works utilizing new applied sciences, and likewise launched artists to his colleagues.
In October 1966, he and Robert Rauschenberg organised an occasion known as ‘9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering’ at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory. Greater than 10,000 curious spectators turned out to observe experimental performances by artists corresponding to Lucinda Childs and John Cage, in partnership with Bell Lab engineers.
‘Sensing the Future: Experiments in Artwork and Expertise (E.A.T.)’, 2025-2026, The Tower, Residing Archives Gallery, Parc des Ateliers, LUMA Arles, France
(Picture credit score: © Victor&Simon – Victor Picon)
Quickly afterwards, an open name was held for individuals to take part on this burgeoning motion. ‘They thought a number of individuals would reply,’ says LUMA curator Martin Guinard. ‘However tons of of artists and engineers proposed tasks.’ The E.A.T. motion was formally born, and lasted for a few decade, till it fizzled out – maybe, says Guinard, as a result of Bell Labs grew uninterested in the distraction, or perhaps as a result of artists now not wished to be related to an organization that was more and more concerned with army contracts.
This exhibition was organised with the Getty Analysis Institute, which owns greater than 200 containers of paperwork, images, movies, and objects from E.A.T. Most likely essentially the most placing work on show is the 1968 Cone Pyramid (Coronary heart Beats Mud) by Jean Dupuy. Once you maintain a stethoscope to your chest, a dusting of purple pigment in a glass field bounces to the rhythm of your heartbeat. One other intriguing piece is Moon Museum (1969) by sculptor Forrest Myers, who etched drawings (together with a tiny penis by Warhol) onto a collection of small ceramic wafers, one in every of which he surreptitiously despatched to the Moon on Apollo 12.
One room is devoted to the 1970 World’s Truthful in Osaka, Japan, when Pepsi-Cola employed E.A.T. to make its pavilion futuristic and high-tech. The E.A.T. members hated the geodesic dome-like constructing, and requested Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya to masks it in a cloud of fog. She known as this a ‘destructive sculpture’, ever-changing and moulded by the wind.
Fog Sculpture, Pepsi Pavillion, Japan World Exposition 1970, Fujiko Nakaya
(Picture credit score: Getty Analysis Institute © J. Paul Getty Belief)
‘Maria Lassnig: Residing with artwork stops one wilting!’
Whereas E.A.T. was a (largely male-dominated) motion that broke down limitations between artwork and know-how, the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig resisted the limitations of what a girl may do within the artwork world. She is the topic of LUMA Arles’ second exhibition on this collection – ‘Maria Lassnig: Residing with artwork stops one wilting!’ – which explores the connection between Lassnig and Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Born in 1919, Lassnig coined an idea, ‘Physique Consciousness’, portray or drawing what it felt prefer to be inside her physique, regardless of how uncomfortable. The end result was vividly vibrant, extremely private, incessantly violent, and sometimes humorous.
Self-Portrait with Saucepan (1995) reveals the artist with an overturned kitchen pan on her head, her mouth open like a response to Munch’s scream. In a collection of watercolours, Lassnig inserted her personal picture because the hero of basic Greek mythological tales. For the brief animated movie The Ballad of Maria Lassnig, made in 1992, she sang her life story, carrying varied costumes, towards a background of her characters in movement. After a long time of working in near-obscurity, Lassnig lastly acquired recognition later in life, receiving the Golden Lion for lifelong achievement on the 2013 Venice Biennale.
Maria Lassnig, Vienna 1983
(Picture credit score: © Maria Lassnig Basis © ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Picture : © Kurt-Michael Westermann)
‘Dance with Daemons’
The third exhibition, ‘Dance with Daemons’ snakes up and down the partitions and thru the massive foremost gallery of the Frank Gehry tower and out into the backyard, every work resulting in the subsequent like a sequence response. Tino Sehgal, who choreographed an identical present for the Fondation Beyeler final yr, selected works from the Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Basis assortment and from the Fondation Beyeler, juxtaposing them in unconventional methods.
For instance, Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph of a Buenos Aires storm drain is sandwiched between Naoya Hatakeyama’s River Sequence pictures, whereas the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s bust of Mademoiselle Pogany II sits head to head with Alberto Giacometti’s bronze of Romanian photographer Éli Lotar III. Because the present ready to open, Hoffmann admitted to Seghal that his number of her works shocked her. ‘You selected the issues which can be notably non-public, and weren’t collected to be proven,’ she stated. ‘This choreography completely modified my view of them.’
‘Dance with Daemons‘ (a reputation that can change all through the run) additionally reveals how know-how has grow to be an integral a part of modern artwork at present. Carsten Höller’s spherical rotating mattress invitations viewers to take a nap after which file their desires for evaluation by MIT scientists. Pierre Huyghe’s golden masks emit an AI-generated ‘voice’ in actual time. Outdoors on the garden, Philippe Parreno’s antennae-like Membrane collects invisible environmental information via sensors and interprets it into sound.
‘Dance with Daemons’, 2025, Parc des Ateliers, LUMA Arles, France
(Picture credit score: © Victor&Simon – Grégoire D’Ablon)
And extremely, 55 years after creating her fog sculpture for the Osaka Pepsi Pavilion, Fujiko Nakaya got here to Arles this spring, at age 91, to create a brief fog sculpture for the pond. The mist drifts and floats, at instances hiding Gehry’s tower or enveloping bystanders in its damp embrace as frogs croak close by. A day earlier than the opening, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, creative director of LUMA Arles, famous that Nakaya herself is a power of nature. As she advised him after her lengthy journey from Japan: ‘I’m drained till I scent the primary drop.’
LUMA Arles’ exhibitions have totally different finish dates, with the ultimate exhibition closing on 10 Could 2026. Full data at luma.org
Supply: Wallpaper
