LIMINAL

Liminal Space (2024) is a photographic and video-based project by Kwazokuhle Phakathi,

created for the AI vs HI exhibition at Deichtorhallen Hamburg’s Klub der Künste. Facilitated by Through The Lens Collective and Andre Luetzen

The work explores the face as a site of first encounter - the point where recognition,

emotion, and connection unfold between human beings. In this series, that moment of

intimacy is interrupted by artificial intelligence, which converts the face into data, an image

into information, and emotion into code. The face becomes something abstracted - an

artefact caught between memory and machine, between what is human and what is

generated.

Liminal Space moves within this in-between - a digital threshold where millions of “humans”

can be created in a split second. Through this lens, Phakathi reflects on AI’s desire to

imitate, and perhaps even surpass, the human. The work becomes a meditation on

technology’s evolution and its echo of our own - asking what it means to be human in an

age when humanity itself can be simulated.