At Berghain, art meets the quantum. And something goes wrong

A faceless naked woman wanders among the towering walls of Berghain. The hall is dark and cold. The woman rolls across a deserted terrain of rocks and mud, seeming lost and desperate. The walls vibrate, emitting dry sounds that seem to arise from the very fabric of the cosmos. How did we get here? What happened? We are not witnessing some kind of fringe event, nor are we watching horror porn that cut corners on props. We are standing before a monumental LED wall in the main hall of Halle am Berghain, where LAS Art Foundation is premiering Liminals, a work commissioned from Pierre Huyghe.

The hall of the former East Berlin power plant, part of the complex that houses the most famous club in the world, is so cold that during the 55 minutes of the video, the mind inevitably goes to waterboarding. The naked figure, described by the artist as “an inexistent being, a soulscape,” and created by a large team of 3D artists and AI designers, moves by walking and rolling in a style reminiscent of Mosh Pit Simulator (2020) and many other digital artists who have been experimenting with Unity and Unreal Engine for nearly a decade. But here it possesses a rendering quality and a metaphysical composure that justify all the backing from Anthropic. The figure wanders in the fog. At times it tries to dig holes in the ground with its fingers. At times it collapses to the floor, defeated.

At dOCUMENTA 13, Huyghe had been known and appreciated for staging his first solo show in the compost area of Karlsaue Park in Kassel. In Untitled (2011–2012), alongside the renowned Podenco dog with a pink-dyed leg named Human, there appeared a naked stone woman. The woman lay decapitated on the bed of a pond and, in place of her head, Huyghe had cultivated a colony of bees, a literal hive. Back then, that classically shaped body possessed a literal hivemind, the artist’s tribute to collective animal intelligence. Today, by contrast, the CGI body in Liminals presents a head with a hollow, empty face.

To resolve any doubt: is it just black, or truly hollow? The figure drops to all fours and, moving its neck toward a thorny rock, allows the earth to penetrate it. The room, now subdued, raises smartphones or covers faces. Why? How did we get here? Commenting on Romance (2007), one of his very early works, Huyghe once said: “As I start a project, I always need to create a world. Then I want to enter this world and my walk through this world is the work.” Today, however, LAS curator Carly Whitefield jokes about how worldbuilding in art has become a buzzword, appreciating Liminals as a refreshing act of unworlding. A work that, in the current geopolitical situation, “speaks to the anxiety, and even the hopes and disorientation, of this moment in time.” Bettina Kames, CEO and co-founder of LAS, recounts how in Venice their pavilion was located two minutes away from the Pinault Foundation’s. In recent years, Pinault has invited Huyghe to fill his venue at Punta della Dogana with new and old works. It is there, in the gentle backwash of the libeccio wind, among masterpieces such as the marine ecosystems of Zoodram 6 (2013) and Cambrian Explosion 19 (2013), or Human Mask (2014) — the video in which a monkey disguised with a Nō theatre mask moves through an abandoned venue, appearing like a strange, very small waitress — that LAS first discovered Liminal (2024).

In Venice, Liminal was a simulation in which the figure’s movements varied in real time, reacting to environmental data such as light, temperature and the presence of visitors. But today, at Berghain, the figure is trapped in a video loop. Like shells removed from their marine ecosystem, it is no longer bathed in moonlight but grey. It might be, Whitefield suggests at the press conference, that it is exploring zones “where matter and meaning becomes unsettled, charged rather than empty.” Or perhaps the figure is simply searching for the works that remained in Venice, making this LED wall immensely empty and lonely. After a momentary lull, the hall vibrates again. Small stones jump and merge with the ground. The sound is that dry noise that seems to come not from the air but from the fabric of the cosmos itself. The artwork in captivity is the result of a choice that is not only curatorial but financial. The LAS Foundation, “at the intersection of art, really the latest technologies, and science,” explains Kames, “predominantly do commissions.” On one hand, LAS’s interdisciplinary and innovative nature secures sponsors such as Anthropic and Volkswagen; on the other, “commissions enable laboratories to engage in direct collaboration with artists,” as physicist Tommaso Calarco, Director of the Institute for Quantum Control PGI-8 at Forschungszentrum Jülich, points out — a place where research is conducted using some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.

It is in Jülich that the 100-qubit Pasqual quantum computer is located, with which Calarco and his colleagues created the sound that seems to arise not from the air but from the cosmos. “For the first time ever we used a quantum simulator as a musical instrument,” Calarco says enthusiastically. “With a musical instrument you pluck a string or you hit a drum, and then the thing vibrates. We did completely the same. We hit the tiny membranes of atoms, which are the qubit in the quantum simulator, shooting in a certain way, and we recorded the reverberation of the atom reacting to that.” As with the first “woop” of a black hole recorded in 2015 by the LIGO detector, “this is not directly sound because they are in a vacuum and sound needs air. But we used something that measures these vibrations with some detectors or sensors.”

As the hall and the deserted planet vibrate, the “human-like figure” merges with the ground, becoming an image of that “uncertainty” Whitefield referred to: “We see a dissolution of boundaries between inner and outer realms, and between living and non-living matter.” A metaphor for “how a quantum system can exist in multiple states before it is measured, when infinite possibilities collapse into a single version of reality” — reflections on the theory developed a hundred years ago by Einstein and Bohr, inspired here by the artist’s collaboration with Calarco and philosopher Tobias Rees. While Liminals describes “a world where multiple possibilities can exist at the same time and an outcome cannot fully be predicted,” perhaps that afflicted wandering figure is us, watching Liminals in the cold hall of Halle am Berghain, trying to explain how it was possible to deploy such an immense array of resources to produce what Kunstforum columnist Anika Meier, on her personal blog, has called “AI slop with an exorbitant budget.”

Criticism, especially in the German press, has not been lacking. The Frankfurter Allgemeine asks, “Why show breasts and a vulva, when it could have generated a completely sexless body? And why is everything so grey and sad, when it could have built an entirely different world?” Die Zeit states categorically, “Never has the artist’s head been so empty.” Liminals thus remains in multiple states of matter, endlessly replicating its “uncertainty”: is it a monumental flop, or an extraordinary work that perfectly reflects the era and context in which it appears? Are we playing the game of venture capitalists, or creating new metaphors for culture? How did we get here? What happened? There are moments for worlding and moments for unworlding. At Berghain, as in many places of contemporary culture, these moments oscillate in an opposite, superposed and multistable state.

Last October, during the Sensing Quantum Symposium organised by LAS in Berlin, a conversation took place between Tommaso Calarco and Shamira Ahmed, moderated by artist Hito Steyerl, titled “Who Owns the Quantum Future? Governance, Responsibility and Access.” As Calarco recalled, this is a technology still in formation, one that could develop in one direction or a completely different one, and the cultural contribution of artists, writers and creatives could genuinely influence some of its applications. The question remains who will have access to this table — and why.

Opening image: © Pierre Huyghe / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2026. Photo Stefan Lucks