Pierre Huyghe: Liminals

The large-scale installation includes film, sound, vibrations and light. The film, which the artist describes as a ‘modern myth,’ follows the emergence of a faceless, human-like figure that goes through various states.

According to Huyghe, the action is "set outside of time and space, where there is no beginning and no end, no inside and no outside, only an incessant dance of matter in which every moment is a maybe. We witness the figure's attempts to exist and to escape a single state of reality or consciousness. In the process, the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds, as well as between living and inanimate matter, begin to dissolve."

Using this allegory, the artist negotiates the unknown and leads us into a threshold space where different states overlap – similar to a quantum system that can exist in multiple states simultaneously before measurement, until the infinite possibilities collapse into a single reality. Huyghe discussed these ideas with quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco and philosopher Tobias Rees. Their conversations led to Huyghe's decision to incorporate the logic and outputs of quantum systems into his work on both the sound and image levels. In this innovative production approach, states of uncertainty are embodied and quantum properties are translated into sensory experiences.


Sound and vibration play an important role in Liminals. Huyghe and his team used various experimental methods to create a dense sonic experience. Among other things, they collaborated with Tommaso Calarco and researchers at the Jülich Research Centre to simulate the vibrations of matter depicted in the film on a 100-qubit quantum computer from Pasqal. The results were translated into elements of sound design. Calarco compares the process to playing a stringed instrument, as if ‘plucking the row of atoms in the computer to hear their reverberation.’ Together with Rees, Huyghe developed the idea of a quantum world that lies radically outside human ontology. To create certain scenes in the film, they used an AI model based on quantum noise.

• Opening: Thursday, 22 January 2026, 7 p.m.