Matthew Barney and Pierre Huyghe in Il Tempo del Postino

Pierre Huyghe, “Hello Zombie,” 2007. Matthew Barney, “Guardian of the Veil,” 2007.

On July 12, Season 1 featured artist Matthew Barney and Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe premiered new work in Il Tempo del Postino, a group show of performance presented at the Manchester Opera House as part of the Manchester International Festival. Curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, the event was premised on the question “what if an exhibition was not about occupying space but about occupying time?”

Huyghe’s comical contribution, Hello Zombie, featured aliens playing tennis. Barney’s, on the other hand, was much more baroque and comprised the entire second half of the show. Entitled Guardian of the Veil and produced in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, this work involved, to varying degrees, a woman’s corpse (not real, of course), a contortionist, a live bull, a dog strapped to Barney’s head, paramilitary antics, and a Cadillac, among other notables.

Il Tempo del Postino will travel to Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet in February 2008.

Read the Artforum.com diary’s full account here.