Wirikua: The Mexican time slip

Wirikuta is the name of the sacred site where the world has been created, according to the Huichol mythology. Now, it is the terminal point of a pilgrimage, of an initiatic journey involving the consumption of peyote. The subtitle of the exhibition, Mexican Time-slip, alludes to Philip K. Dick’s novel, Martian Time-Slip. As many other texts published by the science-fiction writer, it is a story about parallel worlds. 

Wirikuta is the presentation of such a parallel world, where mushrooms are as enormous as trees (Carsten Höller), where a weird vegetation grows, made of plastic (Pascale Marthine Tayou) or metal (Peter Buggenhout), a surreal landscape where giant puddles are scattered on the floor (Marlie Mul), sandbanks produce strange scents (Pamela Rosenkranz) and earth is shown on the wall (Bosco Sodi)… In the first room, two videos are presented, as two opposed ideas of a landscape: a dark environment (Parreno) and the view of heavenly colourful surroundings which seem to obey to human voice (Prouvost). 

The show functions as a cinematic travel on a huge landscape made of videos, paintings and sculptures; a kind of mutant desertic landscape, where nature, urban elements and machinic ones have melted. In other words, a sci-fi landscape, showing how today’s artists are adressing the new anthropocene era: human activities are changing both geology and biology and weird organisms are appearing. 

Participating artists : Peter Buggenhout, Carsten Höller, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Marlie Mul, Philippe Parreno, Laure Provoust, Pamela Rosenkranz, Bosco Sodi.