A large, rugged boulder sits in the middle of the gallery on a sheet of grey metal. From a distance, it could be a piece of minimalist art, a hunk of rock torn off the land. That is, until you realize there's a human inside.
Abraham Poincheval's work Pierre (French for 'stone') is a performance work that began on February 22, 2017 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and is running through the week. Part-sculpture, part-endurance test, the boulder contains a cut-out section to accommodate the shape of Poincheval's seated body, arms outstretched.
By choosing the 13-ton limestone rock as the material for this work, the artist questions the different timeframes that humans work within. "I will achieve a mineral journey," Poincheval told Creators before he entered his new rock entombment. "For this work, I wanted to experiment [with] another time than ours, to melt in a geological time, much longer than ours and which seems slower. You should see it as a trip at the geological speed."
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