ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Press Kit
This exhibition presents three exceptional artists’ experimental film works which, in differentways, explore the shadows of their subject matter.
Typically understood through Jungian psychoanalysis, ‘shadow work’ describes the practice of uncovering, understanding, and ultimately integrating hidden aspects of one’s psyche. Here, it is used as an invitation to interpret these films not only through narrative and image, but also structurally, through the less visible systems that have rendered them. To create each work, the artists have designed computational tools and processes that allow them to orchestrate filmmaking through simulation, automation, and generation. Guided by the logic of their self-built systems, they produce a new kind of media whose form– interactive and arborescent––requires careful inquiry. To do shadow work is to look upstream of the content to map the structural forces that generate it.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, FR) lives and works in Santiago, Chile. Huyghe has, for more than two decades, redefined the exhibition as a dynamic and evolving situation, as exemplified by his participation in Documenta 13 and Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017. His exhibitions operate as speculative fictions, with continuities between life forms, technology, biological and inert matter that learn and modify. Rather than fixed objects, his works unfold as situations shaped by time and experience.
Huyghe’s recent exhibitions include UUmwelt, MoMA, New York (2026), Beyeler Foundation (2026), Liminal, Punta della Dogana – Pinault Collection, Venice (2024) and Leeum, Seoul (2025); Chimera, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art (2023); Variants, Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker (2022); After UUmwelt, LUMA Arles (2021); UUmwelt, Serpentine Gallery, London (2018); After ALife Ahead, Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); and The Roof Garden, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015). In 2012, his work Untilled was one of the most critically acclaimed contributions to dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. In 2013, a retrospective of Pierre Huyghe’s work at Centre Pompidou in Paris travelled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and LACMA in Los Angeles. In 2019, Huyghe was appointed Artistic Director of the Okayama Art Summit: IF THE SNAKE.
dmstfctn
dmstfctn(Oliver Smith b. 1989, UK and Francesco Tacchini b. 1991, IT) is a London- and Berlin-based artist duo exploring complex systems through simulation, fiction, and experience. Their immersive performances, video installations and video games demystify systems by replicating and exploring them together with audiences, and ‘re-mystify’ them by building new stories and worlds on top of them.
Wu Ziyana
Ziyang Wu (b.1990, CN) is a Hangzhou-based artist. His practice examines how current technologies cross cultural contexts at the macro and micro levels, affecting relational politics and the societies they govern. His video, augmented reality, AI simulation, and interactive installations have exhibited internationally, including the 61stVenice Biennale, ICA Philadelphia, M+ Museum, Rhizome at the New Museum, Walker Art Center, PinchukArtCentre, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, UCCA, Power Station of Art, HEK Basel, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH Asia, SXSW, By Art Matters Museum, Times Art Museum and TANK Shanghai. He was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2024 and was a finalist for the 7th VH Award in 2026.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Eva Jäger
Eva Jäger is a London-based curator, currently Curator of Arts Technologies and Creative AI Lead at Serpentine. She commissions artists working with advanced technologies and collaborates alongside these creators in teams that design novel approaches, workflows and philosophies for emerging tech. She has worked with artists such as Holly Herndon, Jenna Sutela, and Hito Steyerl, among others. Eva is pursuing doctoral research at King’s College London titledSim2Real: On the Cultural and Political Dimensions of AI in the Real World.This practice-based PhD will be grounded in and realised through an upcoming exhibition at Serpentine on this topic
