« Since my teens, I wanted to choreograph a ballet without humans, » Cyprien Gaillard has said about Nightlife, a stunningly beautiful and highly sensuous video work, shot entirely at night with 3D technology over a two-year period. This new acquisition for the MAC’s collection is a major production that addresses themes dear to Gaillard, including cultural cohabitation, revolution, preservation, and entropy. A wide range of subjects are woven together to form the poetic, historical, and narrative thread: Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker at the Cleveland Museum of Art, partially destroyed during a protest bombing in 1970; the luxuriant vegetation of the Los Angeles Basin; an annual fireworks event organized at the Berlin Olympiastadion; and the oak tree planted in memory of Jesse Owens at the Cleveland high school that the internationally celebrated American athlete attended.