Pierre Huyghe, born 1962 in Paris, has designed an installation for the Secession which reflects his new interest in the ways in which perceptual processes function - an interest he plans to pursue in further exhibitions.

A number of Pierre Huyghe's works are based on film with its imaginative qualities and the specific relation between the experience of fiction and reality. Instead of producing films himself, Huyghe examines his own knowledge and observations of perception and interpretation of reality based on film. For instance he has amateur actors play the role of James Stewart and Grace Kelly in his version of Alfred Hitchkock's film classic "Rear Window". In so doing he poses various questions: What would it be like if everyone imagined his/her life as a role in a film and saw him/herself as an actor in this film? Or what if we could encounter the real events and situations of everyday life as film settings, viewing them as being nothing more than the reality of an imagined film? In his exhibition project in Bordeaux ("Traffic", 1996) Pierre Huyghe had dealt with this interplay between reality and fiction in a different way. For this purpose he organized a bus trip through the city. During the ride the viewers saw a video showing the stretch the bus was travelling almost simultaneously. The artist had made this video the day before, who had shot the same stretch with his camera. The seeming convergence between these two observed situations (live and/or on video) demonstrated how reality and fiction can be interchanged or confused.