‘Liminal’ exhibit explores human-machine connections with skeleton ritual

PIERRE Huyghe, the French artist responsible for “Liminal,” an expansive exhibition showcased at Venice’s Punta della Dogana, co-created alongside curator Anne Stenne, delves into inquiries surrounding the connections between the human and nonhuman realms, exploring the intersections of animals and machines.

In “Camata,” a film edited in real time by artificial intelligence, a set of machines performs a bizarre ritual on the skeleton of a young man found in Chile’s Atacama desert, the world’s oldest and driest.

“The ritual performed by the machines appears at once as an endless funeral rite, an operating theater and the learning process and formation of a specific lifeless subjectivity,” according to the exhibition’s website.

It describes the film as a “self-presentation that endlessly edits itself, without linearity, beginning or end.”

The skeleton is thought to be that of a miner who died 100 years ago and now lies in a region where astronomers base their telescopes in these extreme conditions to study planets outside our solar system.

One room in the exhibition is an aquarium containing animals, such as a hermit crab living inside a replica of a 1910 sculpture entitled Sleeping Muse. The crab and the muse’s heads are intended to embody the hybridization of two species, between a nonhuman being and a human representation.

The exhibition’s films, sculptures, and installations featuring living creatures will be exhibited later at the Leeum Museum in Seoul.

The show is one of the first to open ahead of the Venice Biennale, which starts on April 20 and will end when the Biennale ends on Nov. 24.

Visitors stand in front of the work “Camata” by Pierre Huyghe in the Punta della Dogana Museum. “Camata” shows a human skeleton around which robotic arms perform a kind of bizarre burial ritual. For the show, the French documenta artist travelled to the Atacama Desert to visit a skeleton that is around 100 years old.