Pierre Huyghe: Liminals Review – Terrifying quantum visions at a notorious Berlin club take vision beyond belief | art

go Climb the concrete stairs, cross the concrete floor and take care of the concrete pillars. People feel their way in the dark, waiting for their eyes to adjust, though most give up and start navigating by the light of their smartphones, trying to find Pierre Huygé’s new work without quite realizing they’re actually in it. Huyghe’s Liminals is more than just a film projected on a towering screen in a ruined power plant. It is a quantum experience, a mythical journey and a terrifying vision, synchronized with a moving rhythm of oscillating vibrations, an aural rain of dancing particles, and a sudden, deafening crackle that bounces around. You can’t always tell what’s happening on screen and what’s happening in the cavernous space around you.

I could feel the vibrations even on the street outside, looking at the massive shell of the defunct 1950s power and heating station that once served the socialist paradise of post-war East Berlin. Now home to the world’s most famous techno venue, Berghain, it also hosts a gay sex club, dark spaces and bars, while the factory’s former boiler room, Halle am Berghain, with its columns and suspended coal chutes, has now been taken over by the LAS Art Foundation to stage a number of exhibitions, including Huyghe’s Liminals.

Light comes and goes on the screen, never enough to allow you to feel the size of the space you’ve entered. It is difficult to measure distances. A delicate hand appears on the screen, not quite in color, not quite in black and white. Here lies an almost human-like body, in a bleak, dry area, completely devoid of life. Maybe Mars is too. A female face appears with short, cropped hair: except there is no face, just a dark, yawning hollow carved between the chin and the brow. This is more than worrying. Suddenly everything tilts and a roaring abyss opens up, and we see the same figure, small and far away on the edge of a larger, all-consuming void. Balls of light rotate in space and disappear again. There is a great deal of audio-visual interference and everything hangs for a moment on the verge of complete collapse. These anomalies and glitches in space and time have to do with Huey’s involvement with quantum mechanics, and the conversations he was having, through the LAS Foundation, with physicists and philosophers. Artists often read or misread philosophy or science – whether Martin Heidegger or Werner Heisenberg – as if it were poetry, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Watching Huyghe’s somewhat human character navigate a completely indifferent world is a painful experience. They look very human, as the camera focuses on their filthy hands and mottled skin, their cuts and scrapes, their breasts and their cesarean scar, their vulnerable nudity, made somehow more awkward and unsettling by being coded female. Sometimes they walk on hands and knees, sometimes they walk deliberately, sometimes they are idle on the ground like a beached fish, sometimes they beat the ground with their heads, or hit their foreheads on the ground, sometimes they sit and look at their hands with eyes they do not have; The sounds of crawling and crawling, the sifting of grit and the shifting of small stones make the whole thing both believable and extremely vile. Is this a person or an avatar? At some point they approach a strange rocky outcropping and pierce the void in their heads with it, moving back and forth, a cyclical, rhythmic movement that is both strange and terrifying to watch. Does this have anything to do with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? Look for me. At another point, the character’s hands become unnaturally flexible, and her fingers curl and curl the wrong way and become strangely weak.

The camera focuses on the shapes in the rocks, on the shadows and silhouettes. I see a human figure here, lips and a full face there, and occasional gargoyles staring back, not unlike the sculptures of Willem de Kooning, or the painted heads of Francis Bacon. In search of expressions, we project them onto inanimate objects. There’s something else that glows in the dark, but it’s less likely to be gold than poop. I also thought of Samuel Beckett’s How It Be, and the endless crawling through the mud, and the old existential dread. Speaking to Huyghe after spending an hour at Liminals, he said it was fine to take one step toward cliché, but never two steps.

Much of this new work relates to previous sculptures and films by the French artist. I thought of the macaque, dressed as a waitress and wearing a feminine human mask in his 2014 film Untitled, filmed in an abandoned restaurant near the Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone, and of the concrete version of a reclining 19th-century nude statue by Max Weber, its head covered by a live beehive, as part of Huyghe’s untilled at Documenta 13 in 2012.

What’s on the screen and what’s happening in the space around me confuses me. What happens in the here and now in Liminals harkens back to Huyghe’s earlier works, with the entire world becoming more rounded with each new work. This is intentional on Huyghe’s part. For all the talk of quantum mechanics, of waveform collapse, of waves and particles (which is the way we’ve always thought of light), what seems to me important here is a kind of porosity, between past and present, objects and images, inside and outside. One of the reasons the artist wanted to show at Berghain was to replicate the activities elsewhere in the building, where bodies dance, people who desire and yearn and lose themselves in music and sex, in limitless and limited spaces. Liminals have settled into my head, and they won’t go away. How alive he is, how troubled he is.