Pierre Huyghe’s Liminals arrives in Berlin, carrying traces of its Venice iteration yet asserting itself as something different. Whereas Liminal unfolded Biennale-adjacent in 2024, the Berlin adaptation reconfigures itself against the raw architecture and social weight of the Halle am Berghain, which drew the heart attack-inducing mega-crowd one might expect, and a queue at least one thousand bodies deep.
Inside, the space is dark and disorienting. Shrouded in darkness, the work itself offers the only glimmer of illumination. Like the version shown in Venice, a colossal projection spans almost the full height of the disused power plant, becoming source, threshold, and total environment.
The piece begins in a post-apocalyptic landscape somewhere between ocean floor and lunar surface: void of colour, harsh, and rocky under an overcast sky. Sometimes it hails. The only sign of life is a nude woman wriggling around on the ground like a cockroach turned upside down. Sure, her corpus is human, but the way she moves is not.
She does not speak, but that may have something to do with the gaping hole in her head where a face would be. She does not express fear or distress, yet her presence is profoundly unsettling. While she cannot “see” as such, she is seemingly aware of her surroundings. Crouched on all fours or wandering on two feet, she looks to be searching for something. At one point she probes her finger into the earth like a drill. The camera pans out, revealing hundreds of tiny holes in the ground presumably made by her.
The traces of her repeated labour across the rugged landscape suggest persistence, endurance, and an almost obsessive engagement with some kind of motive. Her movements oscillate between animalistic and ritualistic. How long has she been here? What is she doing? She does not express fear or distress, yet her existence is disconcerting.
She hovers her hand over the void where her face should be, as if to shield it. The most unsettling moment, however, comes with a small boulder, whose size and shape fit almost perfectly within the black cavity of her head. She presses her face-crevice into the rock—an act that is, on the surface, innocent, yet profoundly disturbing in its intimacy and strangeness.
Everything she does feels human but not. Her fingers bend with an almost uncanny artificiality, evoking early aughts digital figures like Boneless Girl or Falling Girl, pseudo-conscious avatars whose gestures are human-shaped but subtly off. Her hand postures are surrendered and un-precise. She is also alone: vulnerable, alienated, inscrutable. Around her, the rocks glow with a deep, inner fire. With all the distortion and tampering of the environment, it almost feels as if this place would be better off without her.
A loud BOOM jolts us from our seats. The projection and the landscape — with its deep crevices and fractured terrain — are accompanied by a dense, unsettling soundscape. As she moves, the sounds of this grey hellscape persist — sharp, cold, violent — placing us alongside her as helpless spectators.
Vibration and sound move through the space like another body. Huyghe and his team sculpted a dense, almost physical sonic environment, translating the tiny oscillations of matter on screen into audible tremors. On a 100-qubit quantum computer, Calarco describes it as “plucking the computer’s atom array to hear its reverberations.” Alongside Rees, Huyghe treated quantum phenomena as beyond human comprehension, letting a quantum-noise AI generate sequences that are precise and unknowable at once.
Gradually the tension builds. Eventually, an event occurs, a climax, punctuating the tension of the environment. There is a kind of climax, which entails the discovery of the end at a steep drop-off followed by a bright white light…perhaps the slither of a doorway? The climax provides a temporary relief from the discomfort. For a moment, the room is illuminated; but no less cold, no less cavernous. We still don’t really know what happened and whether she is okay, or if we are.
Even in a space of monumental scale, the installation feels claustrophobic — not from the presence of others, but from within, the way the environment presses in. The discomfort evokes a desire to move beyond human limits. In this context, fascination with alienation, entanglement, and the pursuit of a universal or cosmic perspective casts humanism as anthropocentric and insufficient. Like the work itself, these ideas favour abstraction and transcendence over the messy, grounded labour of collective struggle.
Seen in relation to press texts and previous presentations, a conceptual thread emerges of the curated posthuman. The installation enacts the alienating drive to transcend the human, all while leaving the viewer isolated within the space. Existential urgency, speculative science, and posthumanist thought converge, producing an experience that is simultaneously apocalyptic and claustrophobic: a lone spectator confronted with the tension between agency and helplessness, presence and futility.
The exhibition has a reading library with suggested titles to support the work, including:
Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones
Beckett’s The Lost Ones stages human existence as a closed system: bodies circulating endlessly inside a cylindrical space, governed by arbitrary rules, dwindling resources, and exhausted hope. Desire, memory, and agency are reduced to mechanical gestures. What remains is a population trapped between routine and breakdown, suspended in a state where meaning has already collapsed but extinction has not yet arrived.
Placed within this collection, the text reads less as an existential diagnosis than as a foundational mood piece for posthuman despair. Alienation is total, but sociality is absent; suffering is universal, but solidarity never materialises. The human is presented as the problem itself — a species locked into futile motion — rather than as a historical subject capable of struggle or transformation. In this sense, Beckett becomes retroactively recruited into a posthuman agenda: not because he advocates transcendence beyond the human, but because his radical negation is easily repurposed into an ideology where resignation substitutes for emancipation, and claustrophobic isolation is mistaken for philosophical depth.
Werner Heisenberg, Quantum Theory & Philosophy
In Quantum Theory & Philosophy, Heisenberg frames modern physics as a rupture in the epistemological foundations of Western thought. The uncertainty principle becomes more than a technical limit: it is elevated into a philosophical claim about the impossibility of objective knowledge and the dissolution of classical notions of causality, substance, and subject–object separation. Physics is presented as having discovered what philosophy only suspected — that reality is fundamentally indeterminate and relational.
Read critically, the text performs a subtle ideological move. Historical, political, and material conditions disappear behind the abstraction of “limits of knowledge,” while epistemic uncertainty is universalised into an ontological truth. The collapse of classical certainty is aestheticised as intellectual progress rather than interrogated as a symptom of broader modern crises. In this way, Heisenberg’s philosophical physics helps naturalize a worldview in which instability, fragmentation, and contingency appear not as historically produced conditions but as the timeless structure of reality itself — a move that quietly aligns scientific discourse with late-modern forms of relativism and depoliticisation.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphos
Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus articulates the absurd as the defining condition of modern existence: a confrontation between the human demand for meaning and a world that offers none. Camus refuses transcendence, metaphysics, or consolation. His answer is lucid endurance — the insistence on living, choosing, and even imagining happiness in full awareness of meaninglessness.
Within this collection, however, Camus is less a philosopher of revolt than a supplier of affect. The emphasis shifts from rebellion as an ethical stance to absurdity as an ontological atmosphere. Struggle is internalized, individualized, and stripped of historical antagonism; revolt becomes a private posture rather than a collective practice. The world is senseless, yes — but so are others, institutions, and politics, which quietly vanish from view. What remains is the solitary subject, heroically alone, pushing the stone without expectation and without allies.
This is where existentialism becomes compatible with posthuman ideology: not by rejecting the human outright, but by exhausting it. Camus’s insistence on lucidity is reframed as a dignified acceptance of impotence. Resistance loses its teeth and survives only as a mood. In this way, Sisyphus becomes a bridge text — translating despair into ethical style, and preparing the ground for later theories that will mistake alienation for insight and resignation for wisdom.
Reza Negarestani, Intelligence & Spirit
Intelligence and Spirit reframes reason as an inhuman, autonomous process that operates through humans without belonging to them. Drawing on German Idealism and rationalism, Negarestani presents thinking as a normative system that demands alignment, discipline, and abstraction rather than lived experience or political engagement.
Within this collection, the book reads as a sleek articulation of posthuman escape. Alienation is no longer endured, as in existentialism, but overcome by dissolving the human into cognitive processes. Emancipation is displaced from collective struggle to epistemic correctness — being aligned with “reason” rather than acting in history. What remains is a familiar ideological gesture: the bypassing of messy social relations in favor of an abstract intelligence that promises transcendence while quietly emptying politics of agency and responsibility.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths stages time as a proliferating structure of simultaneous possibilities rather than a linear sequence. History fractures into infinite branches; causality becomes speculative; meaning disperses across parallel outcomes that all coexist without resolution. Narrative itself turns into a labyrinth, where interpretation replaces action and comprehension becomes an aesthetic exercise.
In this collection, Borges functions as the literary alibi for contemporary posthuman metaphysics. His playful metaphors of multiplicity and entanglement are stripped of their irony and repurposed as ontological truths. The historical and political tensions that frame the story recede behind a fascination with infinite structures, making complexity feel profound while neutralising agency. Choice dissolves into topology; responsibility into design. Borges’s fiction, once a meditation on limits and paradox, is here mobilised to legitimise a worldview in which the world is too complex to change — only to contemplate.
Timothy Morton, Humankind
In Humankind, Morton argues for an ethics beyond anthropocentrism, proposing “humankind” as a fragile, entangled collective exposed to ecological catastrophe and nonhuman agency. Drawing on object-oriented ontology, Buddhism, and environmental philosophy, the book dissolves the human into meshes of relations, affects, and hyperobjects, urging humility, attunement, and care rather than mastery or control.
Within this collection, Humankind reads as the emotional core of posthuman ideology. Structural antagonisms fade, replaced by a generalised guilt of being human as such. Politics gives way to atmosphere; solidarity is rebranded as ontological coexistence. The promise is not emancipation through struggle, but ethical self-correction through feeling — being softer, more open, more “entangled.” What results is a comforting cosmology for a moment of despair: everyone is implicated, everything is connected, and therefore no one in particular is responsible.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
Meeting the Universe Halfway fuses quantum physics, feminist theory, and philosophy into a framework Barad calls “agential realism,” in which matter and meaning are inseparable and agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actors. Observation is no longer passive; knowing is framed as an ethical, material practice embedded in entanglements that precede individual subjects.
In this collection, Barad’s work appears as the theoretical keystone of posthuman reconciliation. Political conflict is translated into ontological relation; responsibility becomes diffuse, everywhere and nowhere at once. By collapsing epistemology, ethics, and physics into a single plane of entanglement, the book offers a seductive sense of cosmic participation while sidestepping the asymmetries of power that once structured feminist critique. The human is decentered not to empower others, but to relieve the burden of agency itself.
Yuk Hui, Recursivity & Contingency
In Recursivity and Contingency, Hui challenges universalist technological narratives by proposing “cosmotechnics” — the idea that technology is always shaped by culturally specific metaphysical commitments. Against the myth of a single technological destiny, he emphasizes plurality, feedback loops, and historical contingency, positioning recursivity as a way to rethink modernity without simply rejecting it.
Read within this collection, however, the critical edge dulls. What begins as a promising intervention against techno-universalism is absorbed into a broader posthuman sensibility that privileges systems, processes, and loops over collective agency. Political struggle risks being reframed as epistemic reconfiguration; difference becomes ontological rather than antagonistic. The result is a familiar gesture: complexity without conflict, plurality without solidarity — a sophisticated vocabulary that names contingency while leaving the conditions that produce it largely untouched.
Slovoj Žižek, A New Materialist Philosophy
Žižek’s text attempts to anchor contemporary materialism in a posthuman frame, blending Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist critique, and the rhetoric of emergence. The work foregrounds ideology and fantasy as structuring forces, insisting that reality itself is inseparable from the symbolic networks that produce it. Matter is never inert; it is always animated by desire, contradiction, and system.
Within this curated collection, Žižek functions less as a revolutionary thinker than as a stylistic confirmation of posthuman despair. The historical stakes of Marxist critique and materialist politics are smoothed over in favour of philosophical spectacle: human suffering and struggle are absorbed into a landscape of entangled systems, contradictions, and abstractions. Responsibility dissolves into reflection; antagonism is aestheticised; humans are simultaneously central and irrelevant, present only to illustrate systemic patterns. Here, posthumanism’s mood — alienation, entanglement, and self-effacing despair — finds a high-theory gloss.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos
Prescod-Weinstein’s The Disordered Cosmos merges particle physics, cosmology, and social critique, highlighting how scientific systems are entwined with histories of exclusion, racism, and sexism. The book argues that knowledge is always situated, and that the cosmos is simultaneously material, theoretical, and political — a space where inequality is entangled with the very methods used to study reality.
Placed in this collection, however, the text is read less as activism than as a posthuman affirmation. Human responsibility is reframed as dispersed and systemic, alienation is universalized, and engagement becomes a contemplative stance rather than collective action. Solidarity and struggle are abstracted into awareness; humans are implicated as a species, yet the messy, risky labor of transformation is largely elided. The cosmic perspective comforts through scale, offering a sense of belonging to patterns and entanglements, while deflecting the political intensity of situated struggle into the poetic weight of the universe itself.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel
Metzinger presents consciousness as a self-model generated by the brain — a “tunnel” through which reality is mediated, experienced, and interpreted. The ego is not an entity but a functional illusion: a projection maintained by neural processes, offering the subject the experience of being a coherent self while simultaneously isolating it from the totality of world and other.
Within this curated posthuman collection, Metzinger reads as the philosophical validation of alienation. Human experience becomes a simulation, agency a perceptual artifact, and ethical engagement is subtly outsourced to neural mechanics. The existential weight of being is preserved, but stripped of social and historical context. Solitude is not lived but experienced algorithmically; suffering is mapped but not transformed. In this sense, The Ego Tunnel furnishes a cognitive architecture for the posthuman mood: the self is decentered, overwhelmed, and endlessly reflective, yet no solidarity or political exigency interrupts its introspective orbit.
The exhibition booklet is available online.
Sir Roger Penrose on consciousness.
Pierre Huyghe: Liminals
23.01—01.03.2026
Halle am Berghain
more info here
