The knives are out for Pierre Huyghe’s latest installation for LAS Art Foundation. Critics are ridiculing it, referring to it as ‘AI slop’, tearing apart the contrivances of this example of post-apocalyptic misery porn. However, that criticism is perhaps less about the work itself than its collusion with big budgets, ‘cod science’ and gaming software. The large-scale projection featured in the exhibition, located in the cavernous Halle am Berghain, does leave a grim impression. We see a female figure striding through a rocky, lifeless landscape (at the opening, the thawed tundra of Greenland came to mind for many), but instead of a face, the figure only has a black, empty cavern, invoking the abyss. She tries to engage with the unforgiving world around her. At one point, she lets a rocky outcrop penetrate deep into the void where her face should be. Later, she bends down and scrapes the thin shell of her scooped out head along the ground, as though scratching the terrain into her consciousness. Somehow, through the manipulation of sound and image, you feel every appalling inch of it. It comes across like a parable of lost connection, of a creature utterly unable to relate to the environment it inhabits. Bleak and visceral, its sensory manipulation posits an unsettling experience, made all the worse by the horror-schlock hideousness of its mute protagonist. Like a well-made horror film, it disorientates – the liminality referenced by its title revealed in the uncertainty of the realm it inhabits. But the work attempts to do a lot – way too much – and in striving for meaningfulness, it loses critical sensitivities. One such example is the use of the naked female form. Huyghe focuses on the figure’s caesarean scars, and later we see a brown foetal-like entity curled up on the ground. Reminiscent of ancient myth, the film taps into inexplicable, arbitrary cruelties that linger long after viewing.
Through Mar 8, Halle am Berghain
