Pierre Huyghe: Liminal

Huyghe's transitional exhibition environments mark the threshold between human and inhuman

For French artist Pierre Huyghe (born 1962), the ritual of the exhibition is capable of generating new possibilities of interdependence between the events and elements that manifest themselves. A central figure in the search for art's relationship with the non-human, even in his earliest works, he adopts an animalistic or otherworldly perspective in order to explore what lies outside our understanding. Huyghe's Venice solo exhibition in the spring of 2024 incorporated all facets of his multidisciplinary practice to explore liminal spaces: areas of emotional, physical and spiritual transition. Within the darkened, hushed rooms of the Punta della Dogana, soundtracked only by bubbling water and the shuffling of visitor's footsteps, the artist creates new, intangible encounters with every work. Video installations show an apelike creature wearing a human mask or a faceless woman feeling for craters on the moon. Elsewhere, fish float in an aquarium tank and an AI-powered system spouts steam, smoke and music from two suspended boxes. Liminal is an opportunity to retrace the career of an artist perpetually fascinated with skimming the surfaces of other worlds. This large, richly illustrated volume, features specially commissioned photographs of the Punta della Dogana installation. The texts by Chiara Vecchiarelli, Tristan Garcia, Tobias Rees and Patricia Reed outline the perimeter of Huyghe's intervention, which is further clarified in his dialogue with curator Anne Stenne. An index of the featured works, spanning 1993 to the present, make this book the most complete Huyghe publication to date.