Pierre Huyghe’s “Liminals”

Pierre Huyghe’s new exhibition is staged in Halle am Berghain, a former power plant beside the infamous Berlin techno club. Beyond several panels featuring LAS Art Foundation’s corporate signage, a flight of concrete steps leads into the vast, cold, dark hall. When one’s eyes adjust to the darkness, a single colossal screen becomes apparent, with a few benches arranged before it. The “large-scale environment” encompassing “film, sound, vibration and light” promised by the press release turns out to be a single digital video projected at 9 by 9 meters, with a soundtrack so loud the empty space vibrates around us. A common aural experience, no doubt, for patrons of the club next door.

Although billed as a new commission, the piece is in fact a reworking of Liminal, from Huyghe’s 2024–25 solo show in Venice and Seoul.1 The new work, titled in plural Liminals, features the same striking protagonist: a female figure, digitally generated and completely naked, with a scooped-out void instead of a face. The earlier piece is described as simply the “first frame” of this new work, now greatly extended in length and scale. For approximately fifty minutes, the naked faceless figure stumbles though a rocky landscape, crawls on all fours, gestures expressively, and wanders toward a cliff edge that, eerily, has the same scooped-out shape as the void of her face. We know this is eerie because the soundtrack ups its rumbling volume whenever the abyss becomes visible. Meanwhile we sit there watching patiently, expectantly, to see what will happen, for almost an hour. Nothing really happens, in a very big, very loud, and presumably very expensive manner.

I am not averse to nothing happening. I’m all for existentialism. But scale and volume do not create tension. There is none of the weird encounter with the nonhuman, or other uncanny narrative dimensions that characterize Huyghe’s work. Instead, the audience is rendered passive, paralyzed before the single, didactic, giant screen, where narrative suggestion is extracted in favor of special effects.

The protagonist is described as a “human-like figure,” but she looks like a woman to me. A young, slim, white woman, in fact, whose skin is marked with bruises and stretch marks, while a caesarian scar traverses her torso. Artificially created or not, there is narrative in all of these details: a narrative suggestive of violence and reproduction that is not pursued but simply appears, as if self-evident, leaving an unpleasantly evasive aftertaste. Suppression is something we non-CGI women already know all too much about.

The work is said to depict impossibility. But surely the point of AI is that there is no impossible anymore, given its limitless synthetic nature. Any imaginable image, however weird, implausible or horrific, can now be swiftly rendered. We are told the work is about our uncertain times, but a figure with a face removed cleanly and digitally—not blasted away by the violence of war or of militarized governments—does not represent any of the considerable uncertainties that trouble me daily. What Liminals gives us is essentially a picture, minutely rendered. Should we be awed by its verisimilitude? While dozens of technicians tinkered away with quantum noise-based AI models, our everyday access to such hallucinatory technologies seems to have overtaken them.

In the days following the opening, Huyghe’s Liminals was roundly slated by the local press and denounced as Edelkitsch, or high-end kitsch. But why does this keep happening here, I wonder? Why are Berlin audiences supposed to be content with last year’s rehashed artworks? Why is Huyghe’s first institutional exhibition here not something actually new, staged perhaps in the vast aquarium-like pavilion of our Neue Nationalgalerie? But the NNG is busy showing its own warmed-through offering from yesteryear—Christian Marclay’s The Clock, on view fifteen years too late. The cliché of Berlin’s belatedness is coming true before our eyes.

Liminals’s commissioner, LAS Art Foundation, was set up in 2019 to orchestrate collaborations between artists and scientists. Such collaborations are by nature experimental, but I wonder how a couple of years of conversations with physicists and philosophers about quantum systems could suffice for any artist to grasp enough of this baffling subject matter to produce a work with any coherence and depth? Moments of the sound design, we are told, “simulate the oscillation of matter … on a 100-qubit Pasqal quantum computer.” But little of the experiment remains in this slick product, sheathed in misleading marketing language and pumped out at bombastic scale.

The show’s credits list dozens of programmers, consultants, production assistants, and technicians, hinting at the enormous cost of this undertaking. At a time of profound economic crisis in Berlin’s cultural scene, where existing institutions have had their funding slashed, and subsidized studio programs are folding, is this a reasonable use of arts-funding capital?

On finally emerging from the gloomy cavern, I take the train to an exhibition at the other end of the city. Here I discover more tension and risk in a single small-scale, black-and-white, self-portrait photograph than in the entire overblown, overpromoted, and miscalculated enterprise of Liminals. In Moyra Davey’s thoughtful and thought-provoking exhibition at the Neue Berliner Kunstverein, the artist’s naked, aging body, still wearing her boots, is draped across a huge outcrop of rock, her face obscured from view.