Liminality in the Work of Pierre Huyghe

This chapter explores and compares two projects of the artist Pierre Huyghe: After ALife Ahead (Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017) and Liminal (Pinault Collection, Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2024), considering the former the direct descendant of the latter. Since Arnold Van Gennep, the concept of liminality has been used to describe the threshold effect in a rite of passage, where we are no longer quite the same, nor quite another. In Munster, Huyghe designed an installation so that the involved technology depends on natural factors; so, the artwork had no real limits, no beginning and no end, and was part of an ecosystem. In a sense, it means that there is no real afterlife but ever a new life of artworks. Given that in Huyghe’s work the catastrophe is always present, the afterlife of the works thus sounds both like a melancholy loss and an artistic and social utopia.