This exhibition mourns the disappearance of the night and the stars

The nighttime was once an unexplored territory. Before electric lights illuminated the fathomless dark, night was a hostile terrain, almost another world. Most people’s waking lives were determined by the hours of sunrise and sunset. But since those early tentative experiments with electric light in the 19th century, technology has evolved to such an extent that we’re rarely ever in the absolute dark anymore. Aside from the disastrous ecological implications of light pollution, electric light has imperilled the darkness and our experience of nighttime. In the cities and towns, we can barely see the stars (two-thirds of the world already live without starlight).

Paris-based artist Djabril Boukhenaïssi’s latest exhibition draws our attention to this problem and its myriad consequences. À ténèbres (now showing at Lee Ufan Arles alongside the renowned Rencontres d’Arles festival) is the product of an eight-week residency in the ancient city courtesy of the Art & Environment Prize, launched by Lee Ufan Arles and Maison Guerlain in 2023. The annual award was conceived to celebrate and explore the relationship between the natural world and artistic creation and is presided over by Lee Ufan and a panel of leading art world luminaries.

Speaking to Ann Caroline Prazan, Guerlain’s director of art, culture and heritage, at the exhibition’s launch she recalls what struck her about the Boukhenaïssi among the almost 400 entries from which he was selected: “We received 400 proposals and narrowed it down to five candidates. They came to see us, to present a project to the jury. When we met Djabril, he talked about the night, about the stars, and he was totally engaging,” she tells Dazed. “We said right away, ‘We want him.’ It was magic.”

Having created all the work on display during the residency, the influence of the historic city is evident throughout. Working in oil paint, pastel and etching, the paintings gesture here and there towards its architecture and many remnants of its Roman past. But other huge influences were depictions of the nocturnal world in literature, philosophy and music. Novalis’s Hymns to the Night and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Poems to the Night were particular references as Boukhenaïssi considered the symbolic meaning of nightfall in art and culture, contemplating what will be lost by its disappearance. “If we lose the night, we also lose all the allegories and the representations that are linked to it,” he explained during a private view of the exhibition. In a sense, Boukhenaïssi argues that art itself will be diminished.

A recurring motif in À ténèbres is the night butterfly (or papillon de nuit) – a richly symbolic creature evoking a wealth of ideas relating to the allure of the night. Boukhenaïssi uses this insect to bring a phantasmagorical register to the work. Moths have an unusual relationship with light. Nocturnal creatures, they are yet drawn to light – buzzing towards lights as, the saying goes, moths to a flame. Scientists believe moths navigate by moonlight, so the illumination of the night with other light sources must be particularly disorientating.

Moths appear most conspicuously in Boukhenaïssi’s etchings, where they recall something quite alien. There’s an otherworldly quality to their configuration of antennae and the mesmeric patterns on their wings, especially when viewed in detail. Aside from their unnerving, supernatural appearance, moths (and Lepidoptera in general) are creatures powerfully associated with transformation. “They’re the animal of metamorphosis,” the artist explains, during a walk-through of the show. “In literature, we also find the moth used by Virginia Woolf to signify disappearance. They are particularly representative of disappearance for the generation to which I belong because we are at a marking point where things are disappearing but have not yet disappeared.”

In a statement released by Guerlain and Lee Ufan Arles, Boukhenaïssi elaborates on the theme of disappearance more generally: “I’m 30 years old and belong to a generation that has lived its whole life with the word ‘disappearance’ playing in the background. Even as a child, people used to talk to me about the disappearance of jobs, for example, the disappearance of snow, the disappearance of species. Sometimes I’m quite astonished by humanity’s responses. There’s a kind of systematic resurgence of artificialisation of natural phenomena. There’s no more snow, so we produce fake snow. There are no more bees, so we’re proposing to make robot bees that pollinate.”

Ultimately, what Boukhenaïssi reminds us is that night represents the unknown and, if the world is illuminated round-the-clock, it imaginatively eradicates mystery, in effect, extinguishing the stars. Forsaking moonlight for what the gallery describes as the “‘white light’ that constantly watches over us”, we obscure the constellations humanity once used to orient themselves.   

Djabril Boukhenaïssi’s À ténèbres (brought to you by the 2023 Art & Environment Prize presented by Lee Ufan Arles × Guerlain) is running at Lee Ufan Arles until September 1, 2024.