Pierre Huyghe stages Liminals as immersive installation at Halle am Berghain

Pierre Huyghe’s new work Liminals is showing at the Halle am Berghain in Berlin, presented as more than a projected film — described in a review as a quantum experiment, a mythological journey and a terrifying vision on a towering screen in a gutted power station. Visitors enter down concrete stairs into a cavernous former 1950s power and heating plant that once serviced postwar East Berlin and now houses the famous techno venue Berghain, along with a queer sex club, dark spaces and bars.

The LAS Art Foundation has taken over the Halle am Berghain to stage exhibitions including Huyghe’s work; inside, audiences struggle to see in the dark, feel deep vibrations and hear a throbbing, crackling soundscape while light on the screen comes and goes. On screen is an almost-human figure in a bleak, desiccated landscape: a body coded female, with dirty hands, cuts, a caesarean scar and a hollow where a face might be.

The review describes scenes of abject movement, glitches and visual anomalies — globs of light that appear and vanish, a yawning abyss, and moments when the figure’s hands become unnaturally malleable — and notes Huyghe’s engagement with quantum mechanics and conversations he has had with physicists and philosophers.

The reviewer links Liminals to Huyghe’s earlier works, including his 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) and his 2012 Untilled installation at Documenta 13.