There is considerable institutional weight underpinning an artist like Pierre Huyghe’s first major exhibition in Berlin. Three years in the making, Liminals at Halle am Berghain was promoted as the most ambitious project within the LAS Art Foundation’s “Sensing Quantum” program to date. The foundation’s mission of championing artist practices at the intersection of art, science, and technology includes major exhibitions conceived of at a grand scale. Huyghe, known for constructing self-evolving ecosystems that blur fiction and reality, has in recent years turned decisively toward AI-driven image systems and machine cognition, presenting bio-technological environments at the Pinault Collection during the 2024 Venice Biennale that further displaced the human as stable protagonist.
For all his accolades, the cognitive dissonance of Huyghe’s newest work is untenable. In a world entirely of the artist’s making—using technology capable of conjuring quite literally anything—Huyghe opts for a naked, white woman of reproductive age, alone, vulnerable, and faceless. The insistence in accompanying texts that this body is neutral merely emphasizes the demand that we look past what is plainly visible.
Framed by LAS as engagement with uncertainty and quantum theory, Liminals is described as an act of “unworlding” that gestures toward a “radical outside” beyond human subjectivity. The venue of Halle am Berghain itself does a considerable amount of atmospheric labor: the former electrical station is cavernous, punishingly cold, with cathedral-like proportions. As your eyes adjust, Huyghe’s soundscape is the first thing you notice: a droning wash of low frequencies that feels lifted from the film scores of horror or science fiction. Immediately, it piques my interest. If any one space in Berlin can suspend disbelief and stage an encounter with the unknown, it is this one.
Halle am Berghain © Stefan Lucks. Courtesy of the photographer and Berghain Ostgut GmbH.
A Familiar Plot
The only feature beyond speakers and lights is a 50-minute film, which towers in a projection that is over 30 feet in height. It unfolds with strategic languor. A digitally rendered, desolate landscape extends outward without horizon. At its center is a solitary figure who has a black, gaping void instead of a face. This initial reveal is chilling and uncanny. For a moment, the work seems poised to deliver on its promise of disorientation—to unsettle the coordinates of the human condition and estrange the viewer from habitual forms of recognition.
Then the attention narrows. We linger on the body in extreme close-up as it struggles to coordinate against the landscape and eventually stand up: coarse, freckled skin, fingernails, moles, a cropped haircut. Next comes the second reveal—breasts—followed by a Cesarean scar across the lower abdomen, just above a groomed pubic mound. I can’t help but recall the press materials, which insist on this figure’s genderlessness, its status as only “non-human” or “humanlike.” What appears onscreen tells a different story. This figure does not read as abstract in the slightest. Here is a human female who has given birth.
Precious little else beyond flailing and struggle takes place over the following 30 minutes, leaving ample time for distinct unease to develop. Huyghe is known for his close attention to detail, so what can be the reason for including this scar if not to make one thing alone legible to the viewer: that this “figure” is a mother? As the soundscape intensifies, I begin to read the void-face as similar to a gaping mouth, a silent scream.
Pierre Huyghe, Liminals, 2025. Film still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist. © Pierre Huyghe / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2026.
The screaming female, and particularly the mother, is a recurrent trope of horror cinema. Consider Toni Collette in Hereditary, who plays a bereaved, tormented mother whose mouth is stretched impossibly wide in rage and maternal grief. Or Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place, forced to give birth alone and in silence for fear of alerting nearby monsters, suppressing excruciating fear and pain until a firework is set off nearby and she finally releases a long, near-unwatchable scream. Lupita Nyong’o’s vengeful doppelgänger to a suburban mother in Us speaks with a painful, raspy whisper, as though she has been strangled or spent a lifetime screaming for help. For all Liminals’ banal inaction, this open face can be understood as distinctly violent.
The figure eventually encounters a rock formation protruding parallel to the ground—jagged, narrow, and unmistakably phallic. Here comes the now-inevitable climax of Liminals: our scream queen slowly approaches the rock and penetrates her face-hole with it. Whatever uncertainty this work claims to explore collapses, and this imagined “world” feels familiar. After almost an hour, this faceless, naked, maternal body is finally given something to do. If Liminals insists on indeterminacy, it nevertheless cannot resist a most conventional closure.
Pierre Huyghe, Liminals 2025. Film still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist. © Pierre Huyghe / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2026.
My discomfort, I notice, arises from the usual place: the relentless presence of the male gaze. In spite of the rhetoric of vastness, the “camera” spends an inordinate amount of time inspecting this body. From Titian’s Venuses to Manet’s Olympia, art history is replete with female bodies presented as passive, universal forms, offered up as both aesthetic ideal and consumable product. Huyghe’s maneuver is to deny that lineage by labeling his protagonist “humanlike,” as if semantic distancing might absolve the image of its history. Yet this disavowal only extends the tradition further.
One could perhaps understand the discomfort triggered by Liminals as being the whole point, that its lack of narrative structure and seamless looping formally enacts the philosophical and quantum physics-inflected ideas the press release references. Yet in an era plagued by A.I. deepfake pornography and eroding bodily autonomy, the work does not escape the conditions it invokes, it reiterates them. The indeterminate void is not an opening onto some “radical outside,” but rather it recalls Nietzsche’s warning that when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back: what at first seemed like depth begins to resemble a mirror. Liminals, as such, becomes an ode to the very structures it claims to dissolve and serves as a reminder of their enduring power. The emptiness onscreen is not radical indeterminacy but a hollow confirmation of that power—one I needed like a hole in the head.