Artist Pierre Huyghe

Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) at the Luminato Festival. Writer Holly Vestad

Until June 26, 2016, attendees to Toronto’s Luminato Festival may bear witness to a strange nude lounging among weeds and cement rubble near the Hearn Generating Station.

French artist Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) [Reclining female nude], newly acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, is a concrete statue of a woman with an active beehive in place of a head. Huyghe’s work explores the “relational aesthetic,” a genre of contemporary art that aims to foster tangible experiences. This effigy, with its buzzing head, is unique in that it encourages not only human engagement, but that of the surrounding natural environment—the bees and the plants they pollinate become a part of the artwork at large. As such, Untilled encourages us to reconsider our own humanly boundaries and the blurry lines between “live things and inanimate things, made and not made,” says Huyghe.

Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) will be on view during the Luminato Festival until June 26, 2016, at the Hearn Generating Station, 440 Unwin Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 3B9.

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