Punta della Dogana occupies the triangular tip of Dorsoduro, where the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal flow into St Mark's Basin.

The building is the former Dogana da Mar, built between 1677 and 1682 to a design by Giuseppe Benoni as the customs point for goods arriving by sea, crowned by the tower with the golden sphere and the weathervane figure of Fortune. Decommissioned in the twentieth century, it was entrusted in 2007 to François Pinault and restored by Tadao Ando, who preserved its brick structure and wooden trusses while inserting exposed concrete volumes.

Since 2009 it has been, together with Palazzo Grassi, one of the Venetian venues of the Pinault Collection.

In November 2024 the spaces hosted Liminal by Pierre Huyghe, curated by Anne Stenne the largest exhibition ever devoted to the French artist, produced in collaboration with the Leeum Museum in Seoul, where it was restaged in 2025.

The exhibition brought together new productions and works from the past decade, many from the Pinault collections.

Huyghe has long worked on the boundary between the human and the non-human, conceiving exhibitions not as sequences of objects but as living environments.

At Punta della Dogana, Ando's spaces were plunged into near-total darkness: the rooms, populated by human and artificial presences, functioned as a sentient organism that perceived visitors and changed over time.

Among the works were the faceless figure that gives the exhibition its title; "Camata", a ritual performed by robotic arms around a human skeleton in the Atacama Desert, edited in real time by artificial intelligence and therefore never identical to itself; and "Idiom", with performers whose faces were covered by luminous golden masks emitting a machine-generated language.

The installation thus coincided with the work itself an ecosystem in continuous mutation, where the boundary between spectator, environment and artwork was deliberately unstable.