Enter the dark, unsettling world of Pierre Huyghe in Berlin

As you enter the Halle am Berghain exhibition space in Berlin, Pierre Huyghe’s latest work Liminals, commissioned by the LAS Art Foundation, immediately unsettles expectations. The installation, comprising a large-scale film and immersive sound environment, sets out to use the principles of quantum physics to stage a world where time stretches, form wavers, and meaning resists closure. Collaborating with quantum physicists and philosophers on this latest production, Huyghe attempted to create a space where viewers encounter, in his words, 'states of indeterminacy – of the uncertainty of being, living or existing'. Rather than explaining quantum science, Liminals offers an experiential pause: an invitation to sense what it means to exist at the threshold of the knowable.

Visually, Liminals situates us in an empty rocky landscape that feels neither entirely foreign nor menacing. The terrain resembles coral reefs – small stones encrusted with lichen, suggestive of life – yet we are clearly not underwater. Vapour drifts in the air, implying water, gravity, and atmosphere. This is, in many respects, Earth, or at least a planet governed by the same physical laws. The camera lingers repeatedly on this environment, asking the viewer to sit with its textures and durations.

From this landscape emerges a figure. We first see a hand: greyish, oddly inert, its fingernails rendered with unsettling specificity, though the image blurs as the camera struggles to focus. Gradually, we realise that the hand belongs to a female body that walks, bends, and observes itself – alive and seemingly autonomous, yet profoundly incomplete. Its head is hollow – no face, no brain, no interiority in any conventional sense. Yet despite this absence, the greyish skin bears unmistakable signs of a life lived: blemishes, stretch marks, a Caesarean scar. These marks suggest reproduction, intimacy, history, and the existence, at some point in time, of at least two other now-absent bodies. The figure’s interiority may be speculative, but biography remains inscribed on its shell.

Although quantum theory was formulated over a century ago, only now are quantum computers capable of modelling paradoxes of simultaneity. For decades, art, especially literature, has tried to represent quantum physics as an abstract elsewhere, a realm safely contained within metaphor. Today, however, quantum computers operate according to principles humans cannot meaningfully inhabit. Ambitious though it is, Liminals does not translate theory into imagery; it confronts the limits of human perception as quantum computation surpasses intuition. Concepts such as superposition, oscillation, and probability collapse become less legible representations than meditations on the limits of representation itself.

In one of the film’s most troubling moments, near the end, the figure bends towards a sharp rock and inserts its pointy end into the cavity where the face and brain would be, repeating this gesture several times. The act resists easy metaphor. It can be read as self-activation, self-harm, or an attempt to generate thought through matter rather than mind. It’s a narrative without resolution unfolding in a zone where every moment is a maybe.

Sound and vibration play a crucial role in Liminals, though not always seamlessly. Halle am Berghain’s high-end system produces low frequencies that rattle and reverberate in ways that sometimes feel uncontrolled, revealing friction, or that the system strains under the material it carries.

This sonic density is underpinned by a complex technical process. Huyghe and his team collaborated with quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco and researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany to simulate matter’s oscillations depicted in the film on a 100-qubit Pasqal quantum computer. These simulations produced probabilistic behaviours, which were then translated into moments within the sound design. Calarco described the process as 'plucking the computer’s atom array to hear its reverberations.' What sounds complicated and above all, insanely costly, delivers rather underwhelming results, an amalgamated mass of unmoving drone maximalism.

The female figure appears AI-generated, which introduces continuity issues. Breasts subtly shift shape, hands move awkwardly, and renderings sometimes falter. In one scene, the figure studies her own fingers as if encountering embodiment for the first time. The thumb bends unnaturally and even appears comically out of proportion. Whether these glitches are intentional or related to technological limits is unclear.

There are undeniably powerful images: the hollow-faced figure against the landscape, moments that stun in their stillness and emotional charge. Yet as a durational experience, the work risks boredom, even if that boredom may be part of its logic. Liminals operates less as an explanation of quantum reality than as an exposure of the gap between what contemporary machines can already do and what human consciousness can still bear. Human cognition remains linear, narrative-bound, and resistant to true simultaneity. We experience time sequentially, build meaning through causality, and decide through binaries. Even in the 21st century, despite brains extended by algorithms and machines, simultaneity remains something we gesture towards aesthetically but cannot genuinely inhabit cognitively. Liminals just leaves us suspended there.

Liminals is at Halle am Berghain until 8 March 2026, las-art.foundation