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Recently, I’ve been out and about, hoovering up the biennales. In Venice, video-installation artist Candice Breitz’s work Love Story, in the South African pavilion, was a standout. (You might remember her City Gallery show, back in 2015.) Breitz is known for her works exploring the performance of identity, our relation to celebrities, and the interview format. In Venice, however, her work, initially, seemed more ostensibly political, addressing a hot topic—the refugee experience.

Breitz shared the pavilion with another video artist, Mohau Modisakeng. In the first room, he presented Passage (2017), a poetic video triptych—a meditation on displacement, slavery, and violence. It showed three characters lying in small white boats, shot from above. Each performed gestures that alluded to their struggles against unseen forces as their vessels slowly filled up with water. Eventually, they submerged and sunk, along with their boats, which now resembled coffins. No escape, bar death.

It set things up beautifully for Breitz’s installation, Love Story (2016), which occupied the next two rooms. The first of these rooms featured a large single-channel projection. It showed iconic American movie stars, Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore, in the studio. They were acting—playing refugees being interviewed. They read from scripts based on interviews with actual refugees. These two famous, privileged white people (who have everything) became stand-ins for anonymous unfortunates (who have lost everything). Breitz filmed them in front of a green screen, with studio paraphernalia visible—lights, microphone—emphasising the artifice. The video shuffled back and forth between Baldwin and Moore.

Like others, I spent a lot of time in this room, genuinely relating to tales of refugee woe—I thought. The twist came when I finally made it into the next room. There I was confronted with six domestic-scale flat screens with interviews with six actual refugees, one subject per screen—the interviews from which Moore’s and Baldwin’s scripts had been derived. The presentation was basic—no intercutting. I started with good intentions, but my commitment wavered—it was too much. In the previous room, I had enjoyed the single projection with the rest of the audience, together, as if we were in a cinema. But here, the sound was on headphones. I had to sit on a bench alone or maybe with one other person to listen to each interview—homework style. It was too personal; it was embarrassing. I looked at my watch, concerned at the time it would take to give each story its due, when I had, essentially, got it all from Baldwin and Moore already. But, with other audience members around, I didn’t want to look like I was only there for the stars. Shame.

Actually, I wanted to go back and spend more time in the Moore-Baldwin room—my comfort zone. It was amazing how much more compelling and engaging they seemed—despite the Brechtian alienation techniques—and how comparatively dull it was listening to real people’s real problems, presented straight and at length. Of course, this was Breitz’s point. Her refugees-being-themselves were exactly what refugees are—an unwanted excess. Her project exposed the bad faith of celebrity endorsements for such worthy issues, where beautiful people front for causes and parade their social concern, presumably enabling us to access a bitter reality but actually distancing us from it. Her work turned out to be as much or more about our relation to celebrities as about our relation to refugees. Pulling the rug, she exposed the limits of our compassion—our empathy. Mediation is her big subject.

Interestingly, with her piece, Breitz hobbled her running mate, Modisakeng. Looking back from her work, his aestheticisation of the refugee dilemma, with its consummate cinematography and lighting, felt like Hollywood escapism. It was a bit too The Life of Pi, a bit too Bill Viola. It spectacularised the issue, insulating us from the reality. The price of our attention.

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Yesterday, I was visiting the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice, and saw René Magritte’s great painting The Empire of Light (1953–4). I’d borrowed its title for my recent essay on Michael Parekowhai’s The Lighthouse, but wasn’t expecting to meet it in the flesh. Serendipity. The essay is here.

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Like many of my antipodean-curator colleagues, I’m away in Europe, on the biennale trail, looking for the next thing. So far, the standout work has been French artist Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead, in Sculpture Projects Munster—a show of new commissioned works that occurs throughout the city of Munster, once every ten years.

I’d heard Huyghe’s project was a ‘mind-blowing, living, breathing installation’, ‘a complex living organism’, and ‘a biosphere’, so expectations were high. It was a bit of a hike to get to there, followed by a two-hour wait in the queue, but it was worth it. When I entered, with a handful of others, I felt I’d been granted access to another world.

Huyghe had taken over the whole building—a huge, dilapidated, retired ice rink. He’d cut away areas of the concrete floor, revealing the cooling pipes that ran through it. He’d excavated the site, digging metres down—through strata, through time, into rock, then dirt—creating a landscape with clefts and mounds, an indoors outdoors.

After receiving the briefing—no climbing, no jumping—I descended into the site. Prompted to look for significance everywhere, I considered ponds spawning algae and two tall mounds, which turned out to be buzzing beehives. Grass sprouted on one bank. There was a triangular section of the concrete floor, incised with saw lines, cut adrift. But the chimera peacocks I was expecting were nowhere to be seen.

Overhead, in the ceiling, retro-futuristic pyramid-like shutters slowly opened and closed their petals, apparently responding to temperature and humidity levels in the room, letting in light, air, and, on other occasions, rain, and perhaps letting the odd bee escape. They looked more like spaceship hatches than ice-rink plant, an impression enhanced by an intermittent industrial-noise effect.

A minimalist box sat on an intact remnant of concrete floor. It was made of switchable glass. Sometimes, it was pitch black; other times clear, revealing that it was an aquarium. In it was a mini-diorama of triangular shards—echoing bits of the concrete slab—piled up like the ice in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1824). This set was home to a venomous sea snail, a conus textile. The pattern on its shell had been used as a score, to determine when the glass became clear, when the sound played, etc.

A machine on the perimeter of the site, I learnt, was an incubator, containing human cancer cells—HeLa cells. There was also an app, where visitors could see augmented-reality pyramids on the ceiling proliferate (as cancer cells split) and disappear (when the ceiling opened).

That everything was connected was clear, how everything was connected remained unclear. One writer summed it up as: ‘Heterogeneous dynamic systems—organisations, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, material and immaterial—are shifting configuration in real time in an uncertain symbiosis.’

Epic and disorienting, Huyghe’s work scrambled time, sci-fi style. I had a sense of being, at once, in the past (in a primordial landscape), in the present (in an excavation site), and in the future (in some imagined hereafter, when the ruined rink would be colonised by new life). Might I be in all three times at once? My temporal confusion seemed to be confirmed by the title.

I was not clear about my own place in the scenario: was I (as opposed to the sea snail) the addressee of this artwork, or just another temporary participant within it? What did it mean to approach this thing—which the artist had left to its own devices to evolve—as ‘art’?

I felt echoes of those maverick American minimalists Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who were less modernists than adepts of deep history. However, for me, the reference points were more cinematic. The work was like a film set; I approached it through memories of films. First, I imagined I was a member of the search party in Alien (1979), descending into an ominous landscape, wondering if I might be impregnated by something in one of those mounds. Then, regarding the inky black aquarium, I remembered Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when they first encounter the black monolith, excavated from where-and-when it shouldn’t be. Finally, I recalled Stalker (1979), where Tarkovsky, with his zero special effects, makes the field his protagonists walk through seem ripe with paranormal possibility—uncanny.

After ALife Ahead was a crazy mixed metaphor. It’s not the first time Huyghe has weirded me out, and I hope it won’t be the last. He gives pretension a good name.