Pierre Huyghe’s Show in Venice Presages Inhuman Perspectives
To the artist, a “speculative future” becomes a vehicle “for accessing the possible or the impossible—what could be or could not be.”
For his latest show, “Liminal,” artist Pierre Huyghe has created a complex choreography interweaving organic and inorganic processes and dynamics of evolution and mutation. Continuing his investigation into the ever-changing relations between humans and non-humans and possible hybridizations that could solve ecological dramas, with this major installation endeavor, Huyghe already imagines modalities of coexistence that disrupt all the hierarchies established by the traditional sciences.
Looming throughout the spaces of Venice’s Punta della Dogana is the sensation that something catastrophic will happen or is already silently occurring beyond our ability to understand. The experience of the works in the space leaves the viewer suspended in limbo, condemning them to this erratic and unsettling process of clueless searching. It’s a “liminal” experience of the space and all the processes happening within: everything in the show appears in a transitional state, with the works emerging from the darkness like ominous phenomena manifesting in the mind as they would in a dream. All possibilities of human-centered control of reality are already compromised, as are all possible rational explanations. What unfolds remains uncertain and beyond human control.
The first encounter as one walks into the show is with the young body of a woman dominating the first room: suspended in the darkness, it agitates violently as agonizing within its physical container. Resembling a trapped insect in its convulsed movements, the body in the video portrays a deep sense of unease, as if losing control of its physical and psychological faculties. The face is no longer visible, blending into the dark space, leaving behind a hollow human form devoid of its defining humanity. Titled Liminal, (2024) the video work is a simulation of a speculative condition that transforms the human body into a post-human entity, a vessel receiving information, struggling to elaborate, and eventually rejecting it, unable to absorb it with the same easy learning process of a machine.
Installed in the same room is Portal, 2024, a sensory antenna that both receives and emits information. An alien, unknown language also resonates in space, self-generated by A.I. and largely imperceptible to humans. It develops its autonomous syntax and vocalization that escape the conventional linguistic structure humans invented. Further on, a young monkey has appropriated human attributes, confusedly moving around the city of Fukushima in a no-man’s land. In this post-disaster scenario, the residual image of human presence is assigned to an unconscious mediator, who questions the “human mask” we already wear.
After all, the main aspect that distinguishes humans from animals is, on one side, our mental process of meaning-making, as we approach reality and make sense of it through the linguistic and visual structures we conceive; on the other is a personal connection, that could result in new memories and imaginaries, or the abyss of each other’s unconscious. Imagination and brain activity are the key elements of this project, but A.I. and technology are close to emulating or even excelling those fully.
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In another room a big screen stages the results of this: UUmwelt-Annlee 2018-2014 presents human imagination already reconstructed by a fully inhuman cognition, bypassing all conventional modes of expression such as language. Capturing the imagined brain activity of Annlee, the neural network endlessly elaborates those images, optimizing, learning and recognizing them independently once provided the human elaborated inputs, potentially becoming more and more autonomous in their elaboration and formulation into new messages. The result is already in the space in Mind’s Eye (2024), a sculptural translation of this fully digitally developed mental image shown as aggregates of synthetic and biological matter.
The following video furthers this exercise of evading the human gaze on the world and impersonating other perspectives, as in De-extinction ( 2014), which was shot with macro and microscopic cameras as the actors immersed themselves in the structures and composition of an amber stone.
A series of aquariums continue this dehumanizing and decentralizing operation: animals such as fish and hermit crabs inhabit and appropriate these human-created and controlled environments, proving nature’s resilience and regenerative power over the relics of civilization. Even the space and atmosphere can regulate themselves autonomously by choreographing lights, sound and air in Offspring (2018), in a self-generating process based on continuous learning from external conditions. A performer sits impotent under the machine, masked and passive, powerless and unable to exert control.
The large projection, Camata 2024, eventually reveals the harsh reality of this epic drama Huyghe has staged in Venice: humans are already gone, and only the unburied skeleton of a young man in a desert remains. Robotic machines all around seem to struggle to detect and recognize it, as if they have already forgotten the human presence that originally created them. This strange funerary ritual unfolds live in front of the viewer as the video endlessly reproduces without beginning or ending, activated by the sensor. With this video simulation, Huyghe has already envisioned a no-human time, where nature and machines continue their existence and their evolution, with no humans involved.
Oscillating between all-alarming catastrophe and passive resignation, the show resulted in an experiment or speculation of a future human condition as we become strangers to humans, forced to change perspectives other than human/inhuman. Fiction for Pierre Huyghe becomes a “vehicle for accessing the possible or the impossible—what could be or could not be.” In this fiction that ultimately is not that far from a potential future, another intelligence has already taken over and subverted the anthropocentric model; humans are no longer at the center as dominant and most intelligent species but have become just very liminal. The message is clear: the world will continue without us.
“Liminal” by Pierre Huyghe is on view at Punta Della Dogana (Pinault Collection) in Venice through November 24.