Pierre Huyghe is famous for his explorations of slippages in reality, alternate worlds and end-of-days scenarios. His work in film, sculpture and installation is instantly recognisable in its darkness and its evasiveness. A featureless child searches for food in an abandoned landscape, a face glitches in a digital schism and shrinks away on a towering screen in near pitch blackness.
‘Liminal’, which opened in April, coinciding with the Venice Biennale 2024, at Palazzo Grassi’s Punta della Dogana, one of the Pinault Collection’s two locations in the city, explores Huyghe’s vision on a massive scale. Pitched into blackness on entering the exhibition, we are stumbling around – the floor has varying textures and the doorways are not fully visible. Something is flickering in the dim light, a small translucent creature emerges and there is a towering, huge screen with an AI video of a face, human or animal, slipping in and out of recognition.
