MARGUERITE HUMEAU: DUST

White Cube Seoul presents DUST by Marguerite Humeau, marking the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Asia. Animating dust as a key protagonist in an operatic milieu, Humeau takes this overlooked matter and imbues it with meaning.

June 7 - August 17, 2024

In so doing, ‘Orisons’ situates one artist’s concerns within the greater scheme of the persistence and resilience of life, between the rolling sand dunes driven by a consistent eastward wind, the drama of the horizon and expansive open sky, the remains of animal bones and nomadic weeds.

Through an extensive period of research and close collaboration with local farmers, geomancers, conservation experts, a wildlife refuge, foragers, ornithologists and indigenous communities, Humeau discovered the San Luis Valley of the past and of the present: an area now afflicted by aridification due to climate change.

This visitor guidance map – which conceptually interfaces past, present and speculative futures – commemorates, for example, the migratory path taken by ancestral nomads, the upkeep of an Artesian well, and the dead bird that Humeau herself found and buried while working there.

For ‘DUST’, Humeau has created a series of intricate sculptures that visualise the activation points of ‘Orisons’ as spacetime portals. Through compositions that combine an array of materials – including copper wire, bronze and glass, unglazed terracotta, onyx and organza – the complexly enmeshed histories of ‘Orisons’ take three-dimensional form.

In cattleguard (2024), a bustling network of roots branches over reproductions of prehistoric cattle figurines. Here, the animal becomes a cipher of human empathy: conduits of the ineffable and intermediaries between natural and supernatural realms. Similarly, Humeau’s work the disappearance of the bird (2024) considers the idea of living beings in relation to portals, referring directly to a moment of personal significance during the installation of ‘Orisons’.

The final component of the exhibition are photographs taken by Julia Andréone and Florine Bonaventure at the site of ‘Orisons’ during the artist’s time there, some printed in large format and others small. This play with scale draws our attention to the way in which life forms are dwarfed by the immensity of their environments, linking the great temporal cycles that engender life to humbler phenomena, whether human, soil or dust.