Anne Wynne of DSDHA plunges into the post-human, robotic world of Pierre Huyghe’s Liminal exhibition and finds a compelling, ever-changing and ambigious experience
A highlight of visiting Venice this year was the artist Pierre Huyghe’s transformation of Punta della Dogana for his exhibition Liminal. The show works very well in these once-abandoned historic warehouses which were converted into an exhibition space by Tadao Ando for the Pinault Foundation in 2009. The nine gallery rooms and spaces in between are held in low light or complete darkness, and contain a strange world of autonomous AI installations and other non-human beings. It is a show that is difficult to capture in the form of still images. Huyghe and the curator Anne Stenne have made an environment continuously subject to chance and contingency, that’s always in the process of ‘becoming’.
To me, this practice of defining conditions in which something can happen, setting up the moment that precedes the moment, but not fully defining how the work develops, has something in common with the work of architects whose understanding is that ‘architecture is the background’. In the film ‘Camata’ (2024) we watch a robotic camera surveying the bones of a human skeleton in a desert landscape, an image of only residual human presence. AI is used as a tool for generating the work and is also a protagonist in the film itself. The film is not moralising about the vision of the post-human world this presents – it just allows us to see what it might look like. The robotic movement of the camera and the light in the desert on screen are beautiful and compelling to watch.
The works, particularly the films, are technically exquisite and extremely ambitious, and yet never made to be spectacular. The film ‘Human Mask’ (2014) was filmed in no man’s land around the city of Fukushima, just after the nuclear catastrophe of 2011. All it really records are small-scale, everyday actions of a creature wearing a human mask in an empty, dark restaurant, as though the film’s waiting for something else to happen. I loved the open-ended ambiguity of the works in this show, and that they might be quite different on each visit – to me, it’s this quality that makes the films an amazing approximation of another world. I would really love to see it again.
Anne Wynne is an associate at DSDHA. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the MJ Long prize for Excellence in Practice for her work on the retrofit of the National Youth Theatre.
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