A Forest of Lines - Pierre Huyghe with music by Laura Marling :: July 9 - 10, 2008; noon to noon :: Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia.

At the Sydney Opera House a unique experience occurs throughout the course of a day and a night. An event with no beginning and no end, no division between stage and public, no specified path to take – it is a theatre liberated from rules. From the stalls to the circles to the stage, a forest of trees has grown and spread throughout the entire Concert Hall. The light of dawn barely shines on this valley obscured by clouds. This is an in-between reality, an image of an environment, a fact that appears for a brief moment just before vanishing.

Someone walking between the trees tells a story. As the voice draws the audience into the forest, the lyrics of the song tell how to find a way out; out of the Concert Hall and into the reality of a place elsewhere.

The Concert Hall presents a geographical displacement. This image is a diversion, an extension towards another world and yet it is the same. The song is a map for a journey towards what constitutes the image. It is a line following a chain of events in the life of an environment.

The cloud of narratives obscures the necessity to find an ecology between the image and its environment.

Huyghe has been creating a variety of artworks and collaborative projects since the early 1990s. Interested in the exhibition as a moment where potential new realities can emerge, in the freedom of non-productive actions, in the layering of interpretations, both factual and fictional, and in experience as a territory of infinite possible narratives, Huyghe’s practice has earned him a reputation as one of the most experimental artists of his generation. Evident in his works is a recurring desire to introduce a space of speculation and play into art, and the impulse to consider art as a landscape in which to make manifest the way people can, and do, react to the homogenising attempts embedded in consumer culture by encouraging the dynamic reconstruction of their everyday lives.

Made possible through the generous support of The Ellipse Foundation – Contemporary Art Collection, Portugal and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. Presented by the Biennale of Sydney (2008) in association with the Sydney Opera House.

A Forest of Lines has been produced with assistance from CULTURESFRANCE, the Embassy of France in Australia, Lumens Arte, Rent-A-Garden (Terrey Hills) and the Technical Direction Company of Aust (TDC). Poster M/M (Paris)

The 16th Biennale of Sydney continues until Sunday, 7 September 2008 in venues across Sydney and online.
Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev