Halle am Berghain, Berlin
This towering display projected inside a former East German power plant-turned-techno stronghold is a gut-wobbling mythological journey that will leave you unhinged
Go up the concrete stairs, cross the concrete floor and mind the concrete pillars. People are groping about in the darkness, waiting for their eyes to adjust, though most give up and start navigating by the light of their smartphones, trying to find Pierre Huyghe’s new work without quite realising they are already in it. Huyghe’s Liminals is more than just a film projected on a towering screen in a gutted power station. It is a quantum experiment, a mythological journey and a terrifying vision, set to a shifting thrum of gut-wobbling vibrations, a sizzling aural rain of dancing particles and sudden ear-splitting crackles which ricochet everywhere. You can’t always tell what’s happening on the screen and what’s happening in the cavernous space around you.
I could feel the vibrations even on the street outside, looking up at the brooding hulk of the defunct 1950s power and heating plant that once serviced the socialist paradise of postwar East Berlin. Now the home of the world’s most famous techno venue, Berghain, it also hosts a queer sex club, dark spaces and bars, while the plant’s former boiler room, the Halle am Berghain, with its columns and suspended coal chutes, has currently been taken over by the LAS Art Foundation to stage a number of exhibitions, including Huyghe’s Liminals.
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