CHANEL WINDOW LONDON JUNE_SEPTEMBER 2025
Cecilia Bengolea | Our Bodies
The Window by CHANEL Culture Fund
1 Bruton St., London
Our Bodies- 2024-2025
Launching on 2 June, CHANEL's The Window presents a new installation, Our Bodies (2024-2025), by multi-disciplinary artist Cecilia Bengolea.
Available for viewing 24 hours a day, The Window is a site-specific public art project by CHANEL Culture Fund that creates access to cutting-edge artworks by artists exploring the breadth of today’s digital technologies. Previous artists featured include Jacolby Satterwhite, Refik Anadol, Cao Fei, Sarah Meyohas, Studio DRIFT and most recently CROSSLUCID. Artist Lu Yang's DOKU appeared on The Window before taking over Times Square in December 2023, The Window was the global premiere of Cao Fei’sDUOTOPIA 2 (2024) and Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Berl-Berl showed at The Window before going on view in a solo presentation at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich from 20 December 2024 - 9 February 2025.
On view until 2 September, Our Bodies (2024 - 2025) invites viewers into a speculative ecosystem where movement, mythology and machine intelligence intersect in fluid harmony. Asking the age-old philosophical question revisited by Gilles Deleuze, ‘What a body can do?’, Bengolea connects her own choreography to ethereal 3D entities – ghost-like, octopus-inspired forms embodying decentralized intelligence and multiplicity. These matter beings – interstellar children, intuitive meteorites and gas-based lifeforms with butterfly limbs and tentacled gestures – emerge through multi-algorithmic processes that suggest a peaceful void pulsating with potential.
A unique iteration of Our Bodies is conceived specifically for The Window and based upon a commission for Noor Riyadh, the annual light and art festival in 2024. Our Bodies evolved from the holographic installation Astrophysical Light, created in collaboration with astrophysicist Thierry Foglizzo. This six-minute artwork unfolds as a poetic and intuitive dialogue between the human and the posthuman, proposing a new corporeal realm shaped by AI, dance, and otherworldly embodiment. In this liminal space, time and identity dissolve into a choreography of shared becoming.
Working with artist Sebastian Mizermont on the composition of ethereal creatures and with Theo Carrere on the visualizations, the work explores today’s most cutting-edge technologies as well as her long-time fascination for manga Cosmos(1999), Japanese composer Isao Tomita, as well as Alienarium by friend and artist Dominique Gonzalez Forster.
Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Buenos Aires; lives and works in Paris, FR) works in a range of media including performance, video and sculpture. A standout voice among contemporary artists – and particularly those working with the latest digital technologies – Bengolea uses dance as a tool and a medium for radical empathy and emotional exchange. Infused with the symbolic energies found within nature and relationships, her compositions are formed around ideas of the body, both individually and collectively, as a medium.
Bengolea’s work has been exhibited at venues such as La Bourse du Commerce Paris (2025; 2021), Noor Riyadh (2024), Museum Thyssen Bornemisza (2024; 2021), The Vynil (2024 and 2019), The Guggenheim Bilbao (2021, 2022), the Gwangju Biennial (2014, 2021), Tank Shanghai (2020), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010, 2016, 2019), Fondation Giacometti, Paris (2019), Performa, NY (2019), Desert X (2019), TBA21, Venice, Cordoba and Madrid (2018, 2019), Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015, 2018), ICA London (2015), Dia Art Foundation (2017), Hayward Gallery, London (2016), Biennale de Sao Paulo (2016), Tate Modern, London (2015) and the Biennale de Lyon (2015) to name a few.
Her work can be found in major private and public collections including Collection Pinault, TBA21 Academy, MIRE - Fond cantonal d’art contemporain de la ville de Geneve, The Vinyl Factory-180 Studios, Le CNAP France, Le Consortium, Fiorucci Art Trust, Tank Shanghai, Fundación Arco, Museo Reina Sofia, Kadist France, Mudam Luxembourg and the MONA - Museum of Old and New Art of Tasmania among others.
Special thanks to Cecilia Bengolea for making this installation possible.