Wander With Lindsey

There were some spaces that I visited in Berlin that were unlike anything I have ever seen before. I personally found so much inspiration and intrigue in the contemporary art exhibitions that we had visited for class.

One exhibition that stood out to me was one that I saw at Berghain a few months ago, tucked inside a building already known for its intensity and atmosphere. It was by Pierre Huyghe, and the installation was titled “Liminals”.

The first thing that hit me wasn’t what I saw—it was what I couldn’t see. The entire space was almost completely dark. Not dim, not moody lighting—just full darkness. When I first stepped inside, it felt like walking into nothing, and my first instinct was to stop moving and feel around me. It took a solid ten minutes for my eyes to adjust, and even then, the view of people, benches, and walls started to get clearer.

A faceless and fully nude woman in this desert-like landscape was projected as grandeous scale on a wall in the exhibition. At first, it was just a pale form emerging from the ground, almost being born from it. The lack of a face on the figure, and instead it being this black hole, made it even more unsettling. There was no expression to read, no identity to attach to it. It just existed, quietly, almost watching without actually having eyes. I feel like since the figure didn’t seem to have any sense of sight or awareness of existence, almost as if it was just born. This also may have been directly related to the fact that the entire room was pitch black; in a way, we saw the same thing that the figure in the film was seeing.

What made it even more powerful was the exhibition space itself. Berghain is already such a raw, industrial space, and that character wasn’t erased—it was amplified. The darkness didn’t hide the architecture; it made you feel it differently. You noticed scale through echoes, through distance, through the faint outlines of structure rather than clear edges.

Looking back, it wasn’t just about the faceless figure. It was about perception—how easily things can be distorted, how much we rely on light and visual clarity to feel grounded or safe in a space. And as someone studying architecture, it was a reminder that space isn’t just something you see. It’s something you feel, even when you can barely see it at all.