LIMINAL

Liminal (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

Hey Chat,

Create a photographic and video work about the human face — the place where recognition begins and connection quietly unfolds.

Show me faces that feel familiar but cannot be placed. Faces that seem remembered, yet belong to no memory.

Let them hover between here and somewhere else.

Make the viewer look into their eyes for long enough that they begin to forget these people are not real.

Convert face into data. Image into information. Emotion into code.

Create mosaics from these faces. Constellations of lives that never existed, yet feel uncannily human.

And ask a quiet question: where do these faces go once we have looked at them?

Where do digital expressions live after they have been consumed, scrolled past, and forgotten?

Then leave the viewer with a final uncertainty:

What exactly does it mean to be human in the age of robots?

Title the work Liminal.