Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

ICA Miami presents “\*sk\*/ey-,” a major solo exhibition for artist Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986, France; lives in London) comprising newly commissioned sculptures and video. The immersive installation marks Humeau’s first large-scale institutional presentation in the United States and sees the artist experiment with form through the abstract narratives of alternative worlds. Informed by the menace of climate change, these new sculptures pollinate, blossom, and armor, proposing a potentially inevitable mode of living, a post-human existence in which nomadic beings live in the air and are in perpetual motion.

Humeau’s laboratory-like methods radically test materiality and temporality in order to explore the mysteries of human existence, ranging from prehistories to speculative notions of the future. Meticulously researched and often developed in collaboration with experts ranging from anthropologists and paleontologists to foragers and clairvoyants, Humeau’s multidisciplinary practice involves both knowledge production and the creation of new mythologies. “I am extracting the essences of real events, and then expanding into ‘what if?’ scenarios,” says Humeau. “I am prototyping worlds that are invisible, extinct, or parallel to ours.” The artist draws inspiration from long-lost ideas and extinct life forms, and uses speculation, research, and methodology to fill in the chasms in each field of knowledge.

The exhibition takes its title from the antiquated, proto-Indo-European term for shedding or splitting, “sk-ey,” alluding to a mysterious mutation of the Earth. Humeau creates a world gripped by metamorphosis, in which soil is peeling off the Earth and transmuting into flying nomadic beings. The exhibition opens with a newly commissioned video that relays the cosmology of a human-made eternal sun, a great migration, and the transformation of earthbound life forms into rootless, nomadic inhabitants of the sky. The video’s soundtrack echoes a transforming landscape through evocative melodies that at times break into visceral, rhythmic noises.

In a major new installation, Humeau evokes a desert landscape. The artist cites art historian Petra Lange-Berndt’s statement “the soil is full of decomposed bodies” as a starting point for the three sculptures that appear to emerge from the ground in the center of the space. Wrought from organic materials like 150-year-old carved walnut, cast rubber, handblown glass, and semi-translucent embellished silk, their surfaces are reminiscent of both mold and flesh and appear to rise up like extrusions of the soil.

Another group of sculptures perched throughout the space appear to have torn themselves from the ground. With contours reminiscent of matriarchal statues, these works seem to have transformed themselves from plant materials to winged feather-like figures. The materials constituting these works—blown glass and semi-translucent silk, waxed felt, and raw wool—have undergone meticulous processes of dying, dipping, casting, and rusting to create elaborate embellishments evoking mold, caked mud, melting bark, fire, and golden sunlight. As closed systems, these nomadic beings “house” themselves self-sufficiently. They populate the exhibition space, perched high on the walls, as if they could take flight at any moment.

Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986 in Cholet, France; lives in London) has had solo exhibitions at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2021); Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2019); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2019); New Museum, New York (2018); and Tate Britain, London (2017), among others. The artist’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Venice Biennale: “The Milk of Dreams” (2022); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2021); Istanbul Biennial (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); and the High Line, New York (2017). In 2023, Humeau inaugurated a 160-acre earthwork, “Orisons,” in the San Luis Valley, Colorado, curated and produced by Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

“Marguerite Humeau” is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma & Norman Braman Artistic Director, and Stephanie Seidel, Monica & Blake Grossman Curator.