Pierre Huyghe's Liminals: A Quantum Experiment in Berlin's Iconic Berghain
Visitors ascending the concrete stairs of Halle am Berghain in Berlin find themselves navigating darkness, often resorting to smartphone lights to orient themselves. Unbeknownst to many, they have already entered Pierre Huyghe's Liminals, an exhibition that transcends conventional film projection to become a quantum experiment, mythological journey, and terrifying vision.
An Immersive Sensory Experience
The work is projected on a towering screen within the gutted power station, accompanied by a shifting thrum of gut-wobbling vibrations. An aural rain of dancing particles and sudden ear-splitting crackles ricochet throughout the cavernous space, making it difficult to distinguish between events on screen and occurrences in the physical environment.
Even from the street outside, vibrations resonate from the brooding hulk of the defunct 1950s power and heating plant. This structure once serviced postwar East Berlin's socialist paradise, now housing the world's most famous techno venue, Berghain, alongside queer sex clubs and dark bars. The LAS Art Foundation has transformed the former boiler room into an exhibition space for Huyghe's groundbreaking work.
Quantum Mechanics and Human Vulnerability
The screen presents a bleak, desiccated landscape devoid of life, where a delicate hand emerges in ambiguous coloration. A female figure appears with a yawning dark cavity where her face should be, creating profound disorientation. Suddenly, everything tilts as a roaring, flickering abyss opens, revealing the same figure tiny and distant on the rim of an all-consuming void.
Globs of light turn in space and vanish, while aural and visual interference creates moments teetering on the brink of collapse. These anomalies and glitches reflect Huyghe's engagement with quantum mechanics through conversations with physicists and philosophers facilitated by the LAS Foundation.
The Human Figure in an Indifferent World
Watching Huyghe's character navigate this indifferent world proves painfully compelling. The camera focuses on dirty hands, mottled skin, cuts, grazes, breasts, and a caesarean scar, presenting vulnerable nakedness coded as female. The figure moves through various states: crawling on hands and knees, walking purposefully, lying inert like a beached fish, furrowing the ground with their head, or hitting their forehead against the earth.
At one disturbing moment, the figure approaches a gnarly rock outcrop and penetrates the void in their head with it, creating a cyclical, rhythmic motion both bizarre and awful to witness. Later, their hands become unnaturally malleable, fingers curling and twisting unnaturally.
Artistic Lineage and Conceptual Depth
The camera dwells on shapes in rocks, shadows, and silhouettes that suggest human profiles, lips, and faces—accidental gargoyles reminiscent of Willem de Kooning's sculptures or Francis Bacon's painted heads. This work connects to Huyghe's earlier creations, including the 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) featuring a macaque monkey dressed as a waitress in Fukushima's exclusion zone, and the 2012 Untilled installation with a sculpture head encased in a live beehive.
Huyghe deliberately creates porousness between past and present, things and images, insides and outsides. The Berghain location echoes activities elsewhere in the building—bodies dancing, people desiring and losing themselves in music and sex within spaces both limitless and bounded.
Liminals represents more than visual art; it's an experience that lodges in the mind and refuses departure. How alive it all feels, how profoundly unhinging. The exhibition continues at Halle am Berghain, Berlin, until 8 March, offering visitors a chance to step beyond conventional seeing into quantum vision.
