Pierre Huyghe This is not a Time for Dreaming, 2004

"This is Not a Time for Dreaming" originated as the central cinematic event within an ambitious project exploring the creation of Le Corbusier's one and only building in North America - the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. The film is a portrait of a situation and is constituted by the build-up of an organism, of which architecture is only one component. Huyghe moves in and out, around the entire entity and presents us with a story of the relationship of the artist to a given context.

The ink jet prints show some scenes of a puppet musical and a film which fuses the fantastical and historical, transforming a process of historical research into a reconfiguration of the present, and featuring musical compositions by Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varese, who collaborated with Le Corbusier on a pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition.

Conceptually relevant to a whole history of Huyghe's work which has addressed narrative structure, temporal process and conditions of representation and interpretation, the film "This is Not A Time for Dreaming" goes beyond the story of the construction of Le Corbusier's building to highlight the choices involved in its creation, the complex conditions of its production, and the relevance to the artist's parallel process of exhibition-making itself.