Pierre Huyghe
In a new commission, Pierre Huyghe delves into uncertainty using quantum experiments
Pierre Huyghe’s large-scale environment at Halle am Berghain encompasses film, sound, vibration, dust, and light. Presented as a myth, the film at its core follows a faceless and hollow human form. He describes the form as “a hybrid creature, an infinite membrane carved by void.”
For Huyghe, unstable perception reveals a liminal space where states are superimposed. It is analogous to how a quantum system can exist in multiple states before it is measured, when infinite possibilities collapse into a single version of reality.
To explore these ideas, LAS and Hartwig Art Foundation have brought together Huyghe and scientist Tommaso Calarco. Their conversations have resulted in Huyghe’s use of the logic and outputs of quantum systems as raw material. This raw material informs the final work through experiments with sound as well as moving and still images. These innovative approaches to production embody states of uncertainty, transforming quantum properties into sensitive experiences.
Halle am Berghain. Photo: Stefan Lucks
Pierre Huyghe’s new work is commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation. It marks Huyghe’s first solo presentation with a Berlin institution and the second large-scale installation presented as part of LAS Art Foundation’s Sensing Quantum programme, which won the S+T+ARTS Prize from the European Commission following the launch of Laure Prouvost: WE FELT A STAR DYING in Spring 2025.
The commission extends Huyghe’s inquiry into the search for meaning outside of human comprehension, as could be informed by the logic of quantum computation and AI. At a moment when quantum and AI technologies are beginning to converge, this project not only stages their philosophical and perceptual implications, but also asks what worlds might be conceived of — impossible, unstable, or yet to come.
“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
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe is an artist based in Santiago. For Huyghe, the exhibition is an entity whose time and space, in which it appears, are constituents of its manifestation. His works are conceived as speculative fiction, and often present themselves as a form of continuity between a wide range of intelligent life forms — biological, technological and tangible inert matter that learn, modify and evolve. They are permeable, contingent and often indifferent to witnesses.
Huyghe’s recent exhibitions include Liminal, Punta della Dogana – Pinault Collection, Venice (2024) and Leeum, Seoul (2025); Chimera, EMMA, Espoo (2023); Variants, Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker (2022); After UUmwelt, Luma Foundation, Arles (2021); UUmwelt, Serpentine Gallery, London (2018); After ALife Ahead, Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); and The Roof Garden, Metropolitan Museum, New York (2015). In 2012, his work Untilled was one of the most critically acclaimed contributions to dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel.
In 2013, a retrospective of Pierre Huyghe’s work at Centre Pompidou travelled to the Ludwig Museum, Cologne and LACMA, Los Angeles. In 2019, Huyghe was appointed Artistic Director of Okayama Art Summit: If the Snake.
