Nestled within historical walls, the town of Arles is a delightful little Roman lieu. Filled with art and expensive organic fruits, vegetables, and other hippie products, the city offers a dystopian yet reassuring promise of a social and creative lifestyle. Just beyond the fortress, Frank Gehry’s steel tower rises – the infamous LUMA Foundation – now defining a more contemporary geographical point of reference for this small creative hub.
“Streaming from Our Eyes” — a still-evolving title that follows “Dance with Daemons” and an intermezzo of “Home of the Stranger” — unfurls provocatively in one of the main galleries of the Gehry tower’s labyrinthine spaces. It’s a serpentine exhibition that slithers from wall to wall, commanding the space before spilling audaciously into the garden. Orchestrated by the enigmatic Tino Sehgal – fresh from his show at Fondation Beyeler – this choreographic tour de force weaves a tapestry of works culled from the Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation and Fondation Beyeler collections, juxtaposing them with confrontational irreverence.
In a stroke of curatorial genius, Wolfgang Tillmans’s gritty Buenos Aires (2010) storm drain is flanked by Naoya Hatakeyama’s lyrical “River Series” (1993–94), while Brâncuși’s ethereal Mademoiselle Pogany II (1910) engages in a silent tête-à-tête with Giacometti’s brooding Éli Lotar III (Assis) (1965). Hoffmann, caught off-guard by Sehgal’s audacious selections, confessed, “You’ve unearthed my most intimate acquisitions, never intended for public consumption. This choreography has utterly metamorphosed my perception.”
At the heart of the exhibition, Dozie Kanu’s A Library as Large as the World (2025) invites visitors to rest on futuristically designed stools and chairs, irregular yet welcoming in form and material. In collaboration with philosopher Federico Campana, Kanu has assembled an extraordinary collection of books to shepherd readers through ever-changing landscapes of world-building. This monumental installation, mirroring the breadth and depth of human knowledge, presents books as guideposts through the cyclical “seasons” of creation and reinvention.
Like the turning of the Earth, summer, autumn, winter, and spring symbolize eternal cycles of intellectual and cultural renewal. Within this global library, ideas bloom in summer’s warmth, face scrutiny in autumn’s cooling winds, endure winter’s harsh critique, only to emerge renewed in spring’s fresh awakening. This rhythm mirrors the transformation of beliefs into doubts and, ultimately, into renewed convictions.
The tomes that populate this world-spanning library draw from the entire spectrum of human thought and creativity, from the contemplative realms of philosophy to the concrete foundations of architecture, from the emotive power of music to the imaginative frontiers of fiction, from the empirical pursuits of science to the practical considerations of economics, and from the transcendent explorations of spirituality to the evocative verses of poetry. Each volume contributes to a comprehensive map of the world — a literary cartography that spans not just disciplines but also time and space. It charts the evolution of ideas across millennia, bridging diverse cultures from the mystical Far East to the analytical West. In doing so, A Library As Large As The World becomes a microcosm of human understanding, inviting readers to explore the boundless realms of imagination and knowledge that have shaped our global consciousness.
At either end of this literary landscape, Pierre Huyghe’s golden head confronts viewers in moments of quit tension, and Precious Okoyomon’s poisonous wooden cottage, with venom coursing through its plants and stems, offers a kind of conscious cleansing.
“Streaming from Our Eyes” – its title as fluid as the exhibition itself – ultimately testifies to technology’s inexorable march into contemporary art. Carsten Höller’s hypnotic rotating bed beckons viewers into a dreamscape, their subconscious musings fodder for MIT’s analytical minds. Huyghe’s golden masks, imbued with artificial intelligence, whisper synthetic soliloquies in real-time. Meanwhile, Philippe Parreno’s Membrane (2024), a cybernetic sentinel on the lawn, harvests invisible data from the ether, transmuting it into an enigmatic sonic landscape.
This is more than an exhibition; it’s a sensory odyssey – a radical reimagining of the art experience that challenges, provokes, and transforms both the viewer and the viewed.
