Dancing with Algorithms: Cecilia Bengolea blends body & machine with Chanel Culture Fund Commission

Artelier
Jun 26
4 min read

Updated: Oct 29

On display from June to September 2025 in The Window outside CHANEL’s Time & Life headquarters in Mayfair, London, 'Our Bodies' by artist Cecilia Bengolea is a captivating fusion of art and technology. The work continues CHANEL Culture Fund’s tradition of pioneering video commissions for arts & culture.

Bengolea merges her choreography with otherworldly forms created through a multi-algorithmic process, resulting in a spectacular display that investigates the connection between 3D sculpture and 2D cinema. Stroll down Bruton Street this summer to witness her blur the lines between the two. Located on Bruton Street, London, it is accessible 24/7.

Cecilia Bengolea's 'Other Bodies' on display in 'The Window', a site-specific public art project by Chanel Culture that creates access to cutting-edge artworks by artists exploring the breadth of today’s digital technologies.A low-angle wide shot depicts an abstract art installation on the side of a building, with a blurred figure passing by. The artwork, set against a black backdrop within a large rectangular frame, features abstract designs rendered in pink and green hues. These designs appear to be mirror images of each other, positioned on either side of an invisible vertical axis. To the left of the artwork, a weathered sign is affixed to the building's exterior, bearing the inscription "FRIBURTON STREET." Similarly, to the right, another sign reads "TIME & LIFE." The building's facade is constructed from light-colored, stone-like blocks arranged in horizontal bands, providing a textured backdrop. Below the artwork, a series of parallel, horizontal bars create a dark textural contrast. In the foreground, a blurred human figure is captured in motion, their form elongated due to the blur. The figure's clothing consists of a lighter top and darker bottoms. The ground in the foreground is rendered in shades of concrete gray, showing pedestrian traffic.

Extract from 'Other Bodies' (2024-25), 6m14s © Courtesy of Cecilia Bengolea

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.

A GIF Video showing 'Other Bodies' (6m14s) © Courtesy of Cecilia Bengolea live on Bruton street, london with pedestrians walking by

'Other Bodies' (2024-25), 6m14s © Courtesy of Cecilia Bengolea

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 can a body do?’, Bengolea connects her own choreography to ethereal 3D entities; ghost-like, octopus-inspired forms embodying decentralised intelligence and multiplicity. Between matter and lifeforms displays a range of spectacles, such as interstellar children, intuitive meteorites and gas-based lifeforms with butterfly limbs and tentacled gestures.

A unique iteration of Our Bodies (2024 - 2025) is conceived specifically for The Window and based upon a commission for Noor Riyadh, the annual light and art festival in 2024. Our Bodies (2024 - 2025) evolved from the holographic installation Astrophysical Light (2023), created in collaboration with astrophysicist Thierry Foglizzo. This six-minute artwork unfolds as a poetic and intuitive dialogue between the human and the post-human, 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.

'Other Bodies' (2024-25) explores today’s most cutting-edge technologies as well as Bengolea's long-time fascination for manga Cosmos (1999) and Japanese composer Isao Tomita

Working with artist Sebastian Mizermont on the composition of ethereal creatures and with Théo Carrere on the visualisations, 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 Foerster.

Chanel Culture Fund

The CHANEL Culture Fund is a global programme of unique initiatives and partnerships that supports cultural innovators in advancing new ideas and greater representation in culture and society. The Fund seeks to champion equality of voice and give visibility to global game changers at a time when the arts provide a vital source of inspiration and shifting perspectives on the way we view the world.

Through this, CHANEL has partnered with leading cultural institutions such as Leeum Museum of Art Seoul, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, National Portrait Gallery London, Centre Pompidou Paris, and the Power Station of Art. These projects are intended to foreground missing narratives, foster collaboration across disciplines, and help propel transformative ideas that benefit culture and society.

The fund also runs the CHANEL Next Prize, which grants individual awards of €100,000 to ten artists— in music, dance, performance, film, visual arts and digital design — who are radically redefining their fields. Developed to provide creative risk-takers with resources to tackle ambitious new projects, the CHANEL Next Prize creates conditions for artists to experiment with visionary ideas, test new forms of art making, and collaborate across disciplines.

About the Artist: Cecilia Bengolea

In an artistic and somewhat abstract shot, a half-circle of five humans dance in a circle and appear to be in an old manor with tall ceilings. A black skin man is on the left, followed by a barely clothed person, a naked person, another barely clothed person, and a red-skinned person. They all wear a tight undergarment piece. A red hazy half-circle covers the circle of people and gives a strange filter as the red stripes show behind the humans. Behind the group are a set of double doors on both sides. The doors are a grayish-brown with square designs at the top. The walls of the manor are a faded gray, and it overall makes for a strange and intriguing shot.

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.

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A man stands in front of an abstract painting on a red background with black lines. The man, a fair-skinned white male with short brown hair, stands with his arms crossed in the center of the image. He wears a light blue button-down shirt, a dark blazer, dark denim jeans, and blue suede shoes. The painting behind him consists of two panels that hang side by side and feature a red background with a swirling pattern of black lines on both panels. A few irregularly shaped stones, also with the same red and black swirling pattern, appear as well near the bottom of the image. The floor in front of the painting is dark gray. — Peter Randall-Page and Rocks in My Bed Installation View at Englische Kirche Kulturzentrum, Bad Homburg, Germany © Peter Randall Page - Visit his profile here

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