Liminal is one of the most interesting and inspiring exhibitions I’ve seen in recent years. The exhibition was conceived by Pierre Huyghe together with curator Anne Stenne and brings together a selection of Pierre Huyghe’s works from the past ten years as well as several new creations.
Much of the exhibition is shrouded in darkness and at the entrance viewers are warned to allow their eyes to adjust. The exhibition opens with "Liminal" (2024), a video which shows a nude woman whose face has been replaced by a black void and who moves around in a seemingly endless space. The human form is in fact a real time simulation, which responds to data captured by sensors in the room. It is connected to an artificial neural network which supplies it with a minimal sensory function. Or so I read in the exhibition flyer. I’d love to know more technical details about the project. Is this real? Or is it a video of a human model? This lingering doubt is what makes it such a fascinating work of art.
The next room shows another fascinating video project, “Human Mask” (2014). Set in the no man’s land around the city of Fukushima in Japan it shows a monkey wearing a dress and a young girl’s mask roaming around an empty restaurant. It’s an eerie video, which raises multiple questions about humans as descendants of the apes and about the masks we ourselves wear.
At the center of the exhibition are what I would call two opposing poles of a pre-human and a post-human world. One room shows four aquariums occupied by different aquatic animal species, from hermit crabs and starfish to blind tetra fish and arrow crabs. Some of these creatures were around millions of years before homo sapiens emerged and they will most likely still be around when humans have gone extinct. The neighbouring room shows "Camata" (2024), another work that was created especially for the exhibition. it shows a couple of robot arms examining the skeleton of a human somewhere in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The video footage is edited in real time in response to data captured by sensors in the exhibition room. I found it absolutely mesmerizing.
The exhibition ends with “UUmwelt - Annlee” (2018-2024), a re-iteration of “UUmwelt” (2018) for which Pierre Huyghe had a generative AI system reconstruct the mental images of a person inside an fMRI scanner. For “UUmwelt - Annlee” (2018-2024) the person was asked to imagine Annlee, herself an imaginary anime character, which was acquired by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno in 1999 from a Japanese animation company. As in some of other works in the exhibition the sequence of images is modified by parameters linked to data gathered from the exhibition space. Also included in this room is a sculpture extracted from “UUmwelt - Annlee”.
There’s a lot more to see and I wish I could visit the exhibition again, but for that I would have to travel to Seoul, where the exhibition will go on show in Spring 2025. There’s also an ongoing performance, but this is the least successful part of the exhibition. Masked performers wander around the exhibition, occasionally emitting sounds in an artificial language. I like the idea of the masks and the artificial language but the performers don’t add anything, they just stand or sit somewhere. They don’t “perform”, at least, not when I was there.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue covering Pierre Huyghe’s entire career. It shows that, for years, he did a lot of different things, before finding his own voice.
In 2022 I visited the Kistefos Museum in Norway, for which Pierre Huyghe created his most ambitious project to date.
Incidentally, the Punta della Dogana is a magnificent space and I look forward to visiting again on my next trip to Venice. In a room near the bookshop and café there was a sculpture by Bruce Nauman, “3 Heads Fountain (3 Andrews)" (2005) from the Pinault collection, which I would have missed had I not gone to the bookshop to buy the catalogue and which I only later realized was selected by Huyghe as a counterpoint to Liminal and as a reference to a recent Bruce Nauman exhibition at the Punta della Dogana, which I now regret I missed.
Pierre Huyghe: Liminal is at the Punta della Dogana in Venice through 24 November 2024.