For His Latest Artwork, Pierre Huyghe Taps a Physicist and a Philosopher

Walk into Halle am Berghain this weekend and you will be greeted with a philosophical experience outside of the usual hedonism for which the nightclub space is known. From January 23 to March 8, the Santiago, Chile-based French artist Pierre Huyghe will show his new film, Liminals—an ominous and charged exploration of what it means to exist in a world where multiple realities exist. The exhibition, put on by Berlin’s LAS Art Foundation as a part of their Sensing Quantum program, is the lauded artist’s latest venture into something less predictable. It may be his most stirring and unsettling work yet.

Huyghe has been incorporating non-human participants in his art since the early ’90s. At the Documenta 13 exhibition in 2012, he placed flora, fauna, a dog named Human with a leg painted pink, and a statue of a reclining woman with a live beehive for a head in the composting area of a German park. A work shown offsite at the 2024 Venice Biennale saw machine learning- and human-directed robots filming each other as they stood over human remains in the Chilean desert. He’s explored microcosms modeling sea life after global extinction and made cinema that playfully blurs the lines between reality and fiction, the organic and the artificial. The participants in his worlds are often indifferent to you; we are not the center.

Since 2018, Huyghe has used AI models to further interrogate the boundaries of what we consider human. He’s shown his work in dark, cavernous spaces that may feel foreboding. The new show at Halle am Berghain lives in this world. When you enter the hall, a blacked-out former coal power plant, you’ll see a circular window of light grounding you in the darkness. Then you’ll come to notice the film.

“It’s a circular narrative that’s telling a myth,” explains LAS’s head of program Carly Whitefield, the lead curator on the four-years-in-the-making commission. “You see this faceless figure that has a void running through their head ... Then you come to understand that this is shorthand—a being that’s animated by something that isn’t human thought. It may be outside of our classical world. Pierre thinks of it as a myth of a figure that’s representing, manifesting, actualizing all the different possibilities that are outside of our current understanding of reality.”

The figure tries to connect and communicate. Its actions become increasingly troubling. You’re faced with all of its possibilities. In essence, you’re experiencing a human state of superposition. It’s like seeing Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive.

The work came out of a collaboration with physicist Tommaso Calarco and the philosopher Tobias Rees, a decadeslong creative partner of Huyghe’s. Calarco, a classically trained guitarist who is heading up the EU’s guidelines on quantum technologies, says working with Huyghe was a longtime dream. “It’s as if John Lennon called me and said, ‘Would you like to come out for a jam session?’” the scientist says with a grin.

The two worked together to develop a quantum simulator that can respond to film with musical reactions. “We excite the atoms, and then we record the vibration that they emit, and then we make it such that we can hear it,” says Calarco of the process. It’s like plucking a quantum string.

That said, the project is research. “This is the first time we hear a sound made by a quantum computer,” he adds. “We cannot escape associating it with something. The whole of Pierre’s work is, in a sense, self-sufficient. A lot of these works do not require an audience. This movie shows something happens in its own world without maybe even needing us, but we cannot help feeling it with meaning and with feeling.”

For Huyghe, the work is all about the possibilities that lie within embracing the limits of ambiguity. “The film portrays an inexistent being, a soulscape, a radical outside, striving to combine empathy with the impossible,” the artist says. “This fictional world is a vehicle for accessing what could be or could not be—to relate with chaos; and turns states of uncertainty into a cosmos.”