The French artist Jean Dupuy is best known for a strange piece—part heart monitor, part sculpture—called Heart Beats Dust, 1968, which was exhibited that year in Pontus Hultén’s “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work consisted of a wooden box in which a cone of infrared light illuminated a pile of dust that pulsed to the rhythms of the viewer’s heartbeat. A stethoscope registered the body’s sound and then amplified it to a degree that allowed a person’s subconscious energies to take visual form. For this Dupuy won a

Sufism—Muslim mysticism—serves as a sort of philosophical base for Yazid Oulab’s fragile sculptures, often made of everyday objects and materials that the Algerian-born, Marseille, France–based artist endows with new significance. In his latest solo exhibition, he continued to allude to that esoteric strain of religion—or rather spirituality—that he perceives as an important part of the peaceful, meditative essence of his native Algerian culture, and to its use of lyrical chanting as an invocative activity. A long-standing fascination with the poetic language of the mythological