One Million Kingdoms

Pierre Huyghe questions the very definitions of time, memory, and engagement in his numerous artistic endeavors, be they installations, photographs, site-specific works, or community projects. Often using film as his primary source material, he dislocates it from the cinematic space of the movie theater, and in his installations refashions it to extend the narrative space of the film through formal and conceptual strategies. Huyghe, for example, has restaged Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and inserted into Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977) a scene only implied in the original editing. In The Third Memory (1999) he juxtaposes Hollywood's fictionalized Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) with an account of the true event of the bank robbery it was based on as related by the burglar himself.