Punta della Dogana

Pierre Huyghe

LIMINAL

The human abyss, the impossible, and the transient

Human too UNhuman

The liminal realm is like a sensitive membrane and at the same time a human space and form.

The human form, stripped of everything, without a world, without a brain, and without a face, moves in an infinite surface, a circular plane of emptiness.

Liminal is a transitional condition, a passage between our perceptible reality and a human entity; it is an empty container receiving invisible information in real-time.

The inhuman entity evolves as it seeks new stimuli, as it learns... but learns what? Its memory amplifies over time, going beyond experience and the human realm.

Liminal is an experiment, the simulation of a speculative human condition.

“Liminal,” the exhibition conceived by Pierre Huyghe in close collaboration with curator Anne Stenne, presents new important creations by the artist, alongside works from the past ten years, particularly from the Pinault Collection.

Pierre Huyghe has always questioned the relationship between the human and the non-human, and he conceives his works as speculative fictions from which other possible forms of world emerge. Fictions are for him “means to access the possible or the impossible – to what could or could not be.”

CAMATA, 2024

Some machines seem to perform an unknown ritual on the unburied human skeleton of a young person found in the Atacama Desert in Chile. This is the oldest and driest desert on Earth, the chosen place for astronomers to study and test exoplanets, that is, planets existing beyond our solar system.

The ritual performed by the machines simultaneously evokes an infinite funeral rite, an operating theater, and a process of learning and forming a specific subjectivity.

The film is a self-presentation that endlessly morphs, without linearity, beginning, or end…

NO ESCATOLOGICAL VISION, ONLY CIRCULARITY… aleatory

The sensors in the exhibition space continuously generate changes in the editing.

While the enigmatic ritual unfolds in real-time before us, we witness a transactional operation between different realities, a passage from a disembodied entity to a lifeless human body.

Pierre Huyghe transforms Punta della Dogana into a dynamic and sensitive space in constant evolution. The exhibition is a transitional condition populated by human and non-human creatures and becomes the place where subjectivities in perpetual processes of learning, transformation, and hybridization are formed. Their memories are amplified by the information captured from events, perceptible and imperceptible, that traverse the exhibition.

For Pierre Huyghe, the exhibition is an unpredictable ritual, in which new possibilities are generated and coexist, without hierarchy or determinism. With “Liminal,” the artist questions our perception of reality until we become alien to ourselves, from a perspective other than the human, but rather inhuman.

A totalizing, hypnotic, amniotic experience from which it is difficult to separate.

An epistemological/ hermeneutic journey of the human condition impossible to pinpoint: an ontological darkness between quantum, relativism, and technique.