Pierre Huyghe presents Liminals, a newly commissioned exhibition by LAS Art Foundation, on view at Halle am Berghain from January 23 to March 8, 2026. The project introduces a large-scale environment that integrates film, sound, vibration, and light within the industrial interior of the Berlin venue.
At the center of Liminals, a film anchors the installation and introduces a faceless, human-like figure that shifts between changing conditions of existence. Huyghe frames the work as a modern myth that suspends linear time and stable orientation. The figure attempts to exist, communicate, and escape a single condition of reality or consciousness, while images dissolve distinctions between interior and exterior states and between living and non-living matter.
An observer witnessing the ambiguous nature of the entity, its monstrosity, follows states of indeterminacy – of the uncertainty of being, living or existing. The film portrays an inexistent being, a soulscape, a radical outside, striving to combine empathy with the impossible. [Its 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. – Pierre Huyghe
Huyghe structures the commission around uncertainty and superimposed states. He draws an analogy to quantum systems that hold multiple possible states before observation resolves them into one outcome. To develop this approach, Huyghe collaborated with quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco and philosopher Tobias Rees. Their exchanges informed the use of quantum logic and computational outputs, shaping both the visual and sonic components of the work.
Sound and vibration play a central role in the installation. Huyghe and his team worked with Calarco and researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich to simulate oscillations of matter depicted in the film using a 100-qubit Pasqal quantum computer. The resulting data informed segments of the sound design, translating quantum behavior into audible form. In parallel, Huyghe employed a quantum noise–based AI model to generate specific scenes, further embedding uncertainty into the production process.
ART
Liminals invites viewers into a condition that precedes fixed perception, where several possibilities coexist at once. Huyghe refers to this condition as a radical exterior to human subjectivity, a space shaped by uncertainty and multiplicity. By situating a human-like body within this unstable condition, the work asks how such realities might register through sensory experience.
The commission comes from LAS Art Foundation in collaboration with Hartwig Art Foundation. It marks the second large-scale installation produced by LAS Art Foundation within its Sensing Quantum programme, which received the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize for Innovation Collaboration following the presentation of Laure Prouvost: WE FELT A STAR DYING in spring 2025.
Exhibition details
Liminals
January 23 – March 8, 2026
Halle am Berghain, Berlin, Germany
