Pierre Huyghe's Liminals: Quantum Visions Transform Berlin's Berghain
Visitors ascending the concrete stairs and navigating the concrete floor of Halle am Berghain in Berlin find themselves entering more than just an exhibition space. They become participants in Pierre Huyghe's Liminals, a quantum experiment that blurs boundaries between film, mythology and physical reality within the cavernous former East German power plant that now houses the world's most famous techno venue.
A Multi-Sensory Installation in Industrial Space
The experience begins in darkness, with attendees often resorting to smartphone lights to orient themselves, unaware they have already entered the artwork. Liminals transcends traditional film projection through its integration with the industrial architecture of the Halle am Berghain, where suspended coal chutes and massive columns become part of the visual and auditory landscape.
The installation employs a shifting soundscape of gut-wobbling vibrations, sizzling particle-like audio effects and sudden ear-splitting crackles that ricochet throughout the space. This creates constant uncertainty about whether visual phenomena originate from the towering screen or the physical environment surrounding viewers.
Quantum Mechanics Meets Human Experience
On screen, a nearly-human figure navigates a desiccated, lifeless landscape reminiscent of Mars. The character's face appears as a yawning dark cavity between chin and brow, creating profound disorientation. Moments of roaring, flickering abysses alternate with delicate scenes showing the figure contemplating hands or interacting with rocky outcrops in bizarre, rhythmic motions.
These visual anomalies and glitches reflect Huyghe's engagement with quantum mechanics, developed through conversations with physicists and philosophers facilitated by the LAS Art Foundation. The work explores concepts of uncertainty, wave-particle duality and the collapse of wave forms, translating complex scientific principles into visceral artistic experience.
Bodily Vulnerability and Existential Dread
The camera focuses intensely on the figure's physicality: dirty hands, mottled skin, cuts, grazes, breasts and a caesarean scar. This vulnerable nakedness, coded female, creates uncomfortable intimacy as the character crawls, walks purposefully, lies inert like a beached fish, or furrows the ground with their head.
Sound design amplifies the physicality with scurrying, crawling noises and granular sifting sounds that make the experience both believable and profoundly abject. The work evokes comparisons to Samuel Beckett's existential literature and Francis Bacon's distorted portraits, exploring fundamental human conditions of alienation and dread.
Historical Context and Artistic Evolution
The location itself carries significant historical weight. The 1950s power and heating plant once serviced postwar East Berlin's socialist infrastructure before transforming into Berghain's techno temple, complete with queer sex clubs and dark spaces. The LAS Art Foundation's temporary takeover of the boiler room continues this tradition of transformation.
Liminals connects to Huyghe's earlier works, including his 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) featuring a monkey in human disguise near Fukushima, and his 2012 Documenta installation incorporating a beehive-encased sculpture. This new work expands Huyghe's exploration of porous boundaries between past and present, interior and exterior, reality and representation.
Integration with Berghain's Cultural Ecosystem
Huyghe specifically chose Berghain to echo the building's other activities: bodies dancing, people losing themselves in music and sexual expression within spaces that are simultaneously limitless and bounded. The installation creates resonance with the venue's reputation for transcendent experiences that dissolve conventional boundaries.
The work's porous quality extends to its relationship with viewers, who report the experience lodging in their consciousness long after leaving the space. This lingering effect speaks to the installation's power to create genuinely unhinging encounters that challenge perception and memory.
Pierre Huyghe's Liminals represents a significant development in contemporary installation art, merging quantum theory with mythological storytelling within one of Berlin's most culturally significant spaces. The exhibition continues at Halle am Berghain until March 8th, offering visitors a rare opportunity to experience art that truly takes seeing beyond believing.
