Introduction

Pierre Huyghe invites us to imagine other ways of relating to the world. His works act like thought experiments, often centred on ideas and conditions that exceed human experience. Using speculative fiction, he crafts encounters that encourage us to consider different dimensions of reality.

For this commission, Huyghe explores uncertainty. He asks: “How might we move beyond a single state of reality or consciousness? Can we imagine conditions in which many possibilities exist at once, where every moment is a maybe and could be otherwise? An incessant dance of matter that allows different states to be experienced simultaneously?”

Over the course of a year, he held conversations with quantum scientist Tommaso Calarco and philosopher Tobias Rees, whose insights into quantum systems informed the project’s conceptual and formal experimentation.

The artwork takes the form of a film that expands into the site of Halle am Berghain through light, sound and vibration. It evokes a quantum sense of uncertainty and multiplicity, suggesting a reality where multiple possibilities coexist. With this work, Huyghe strives to give form to what he calls the “radical outside” of human subjectivity, asking us “to accept the chimerical and fictional nature of our experience”.

“Liminals portrays an inexistent being, a monstrous and unthinkable impossibility. It is a speculative approach, turning states of uncertainty into a cosmos.”

— Pierre Huyghe

Film

Projected at a monumental scale, Liminals unfolds a modern myth. Set in a realm outside time and space, it has no beginning or end, no inside or outside, only shifting and even contradictory states. Huyghe describes this realm as “a space in which all possibilities exist at once, before one reality takes form, and all other potential states recede.” The film manifests some of these unrealised possibilities through a human-like figure.

The figure emerges from what the artist calls a “mineral membrane.” A void runs through their head, suggesting they are animated by the possibilities that remain inaccessible to us. We witness their attempts to exist, communicate and escape a single state of reality or consciousness.

Many passages in the film resist clear distinction, appearing almost like hallucinations or ineffable moments within the photorealistic simulation. These sequences destabilise perception, drawing us into a space where multiple possibilities may coexist. As inner and outer realms fold together, distinctions between body, environment and the forces that shape them begin to dissolve.

By placing a human-like figure within this unstable realm, Huyghe asks whether we can relate to such a reality at all, and what conditions might allow multiple states of existence to be experienced at once.

Sound

The film’s dense sound design creates a sonic experience shaped by broad-spectrum frequencies. Huyghe’s team experimented with tools that measure vibration in space, and drew on imagined acoustic properties of an alien physical atmosphere to build the richly layered composition.

The team also worked with researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Jülich research centre) in Germany to simulate the oscillations of matter in the film on a 100-qubit neutral-atom quantum computer. Rather than producing a single, fixed result, these simulations generated a field of probable states, which were translated into moments in the film’s sound design. As quantum scientist Tommaso Calarco describes it, the process was like “plucking the computer’s atom array to hear its reverberations.”

Vibration

Vibration is a deeply resonant concept in this project. At the quantum scale, even the tiniest particles behave like waves, constantly moving and oscillating. Sound works in a similar way: vibrations in matter create the waves we hear. The artwork brings these ideas together, using vibration as the foundation of its sonic world.

Particles

In the film, Huyghe repeatedly draws our attention to the movement of particles. They vibrate amidst the rocks and ripple outward from the figure, as if registering invisible forces. These oscillations shift our perspective to the world at its smallest scale — a reality made not of fixed forms, but of continuously vibrating, interdependent particles.

Light

Darkness is a significant aspect of both the film and the exhibition as a whole. It creates a sense of boundlessness, and sets up conditions in which forms become more ambiguous. Within this dark setting, a single circular beam of light mirrors and inverts the black voids that appear in the film. The light is subtly modulated in synchronisation with the vibrations in the space, extending the film beyond the screen.