On Liminals at Halle am Berghain


Scale is something else. It puts you in your place. As these self-absorbed, rather arrogant life form we have largely become, still convinced we are gods’ perfect creation – whatever you may call these gods, I think they have all long left the ship. I know, but it gets better, or stranger in a good way.

A Thursday morning in Berlin, the sun is dipping all high structures into warm light while the air is still freezing cold when I walk past the GDR buildings, socialist classicist ideology made manifest, on my way to Halle am Berghain. It is located on the back end of the notorious club, once a power plant; energy is still being produced in a way within its lasting raw structure where the massive halls once housing machines now hold an openness and height that dwarfs everyone entering. It is that type of scale of raw concrete and brutal surfaces that works so well for the installation we all came out to see. And it is here where LAS, a young and nomadic art foundation, is currently based. Their programming hovers between art, science and technology, focused on commissions and collaboration between institution and artist. And while Bettina Kames, the CEO and Co-Founder of LAS, explains how they first discovered the artist’s installation Liminal (2024) – a live, open-ended simulation at Venice Biennial – I am thinking: have we returned to a hand-picked, one project at a time thing as opposed to the widely distributed masses on display that promised to be democratic? Either way, what used to be seen and criticised as elitist does feel generous and intentional here. Kames further asks “do we need another art foundation?”, and I think it is less about another one than the question of its output. Yes, we absolutely need more spaces for art and artists as long as these entities do not just jump into the flow of sameness, of safe rhetoric that, at the end, doesn’t say much – neither good nor bad and therefore does not stir a wider discussion about the actual issues of life.

Pierre Huyghe’s video installation Liminals (2026) is definitely doing something, although I am not yet quite sure what exactly. The 50-minute film is a new commission by LAS Art Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation, in which image, sound, light and vibration expand into the room. It constructs a composed cosmos of uncertainty, engaging quantum ideas such as simultaneity and indeterminacy as the logic of the world itself. 

Walking up the stairs of the temporary home of LAS, we enter the darkened hall. Before we even see an image I can feel the sound of the video which teeters between ominous and visceral noise leading to moments of absolute suspense – and I have to think of Alien (1979), the movie that changed not only the visual manifestation of the fear the endless space holds but specifically left this residue of the uncanny on one’s neck through that sound, that vibrates just one bit beyond natural, the harbinger of something powerful, potentially life-altering. Hearing that while standing under the roughly 9 meter high ceilings is monstrous and impressive.

Earlier, the curator of LAS, Carly Whitefield, had introduced Huyghe’s work as a “condition of emergence”, which resonates with what is happening here. The screen fills the full length of the wall, the otherwise bare space only divided by its concrete and steel pillars feels like the perfect entry to this other, or maybe inner world we are about to step into.
What we see is a landscape dry, interveined with rocks – rocks that look like as if shaped by changing conditions over centuries – brittle, washed out, where only the core remains and around it granular earth, almost sand. It looks familiar and yet foreign – in the time of AI, it feels completely fictionalised with a slight doubt – is it “real”, could it be “real”? And then we see a figure, human-like, with a deep dark circle on its face until we realise this is no circle, this figure is faceless – a void where the most individual of parts of the human body usually sits.

I warned you. It’s strange and intense to look at this void, trying to understand what I see because there is not nothing, just not something. We see the figure moving, almost performing or rather struggling. We see closeups of wounds, of bruises where the body met its surroundings. Can it see? Did it emerge from the barren ground? As naked as it is, beautiful and delicate.

The work continues while we witness movements, close-ups and zoom outs to a world, a force and the meeting of the two. It is disturbing, this world Huyghe has created. For the first time the artist has integrated quantum experiments directly into the generation of sound and image, using the same scanned body from Liminal (2024), its movement is newly animated through motion capture performed by a dancer: “where the boundaries between body, matter and consciousness begin to blur. It dwells in the moment before perception becomes stable, when multiple possibilities coexist at once”, the exhibition text reads. And the matter is mattering and it is then that we understand to let go of the preconceived and to enter into the “unworlding” as Whitefield suggested in her introduction. The offering of the artwork, I feel, is not so much dismantling as reminding that uncertainty and multiplicity is not a new social concept, it is a physical reality and definitely an artistic force.