archivephilippeparreno

The Exhibition as Art Object: Phillipe Parreno's Recent Filmwork

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
020 7402 6075
London
Philippe Parreno
November 25, 2010-February 13, 2011

Philippe Parreno’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery has been conceived as a scripted space in which a series of events unfolds. The visitor is guided through the galleries by the orchestration of sound and image, which heightens their sensory experience. Noise from Kensington Gardens and from the surrounding streets can be heard inside the Gallery, as though the outside is leaking in. The blinds come up to reveal a sudden change of weather. Taking the exhibition as a medium, Parreno has sought to redefine the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent ‘object’ rather than a collection of individual works.

Serpentine Gallery presents Parreno’s first solo exhibition in a UK public institution. Born in 1964, Parreno rose to prominence in the 1990s, earning critical acclaim for his work, which employs a diversity of media including film, sculpture, performance and text.

The show features the UK premiere of Parreno’s latest film, Invisibleboy (2010), the story of an illegal Chinese immigrant boy who sees imaginary monsters that are scratched onto the film stock. In this filmic portrait, fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap. June 8, 1968 (2009) recalls the train voyage that transported the corpse of assassinated senator Robert Kennedy from New York to Washington D.C. Kennedy’s invisible body and the Invisibleboy are characters that float between several layers of reality. Set in Asia, The Boy from Mars (2003) follows dimming points of light and reflections of the sun, before lingering on buffalo tied to a purpose-built structure containing an electricity-generating machine that provides the power required to make the film.

Whether through the cinematic image or the exhibition itself, Parreno explores and manipulates contemporary signs in all of their hallucinatory reality.

The Serpentine exhibition follows a series of related but distinct retrospectives of the artist’s work presented at Kunsthalle Zürich; Centre Pompidou, Paris (both 2009); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009–10); and the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York (2009-10).

Philippe Parreno (born 1964) is an Algerian artist and filmmaker, born in Oran, and currently living in Paris, France. Parreno's work primarily revolves around the interrogation of the nature of an image, as well as the modes of its exhibition.

Parreno has had shows at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco,, the Kunstverein Munich and the Kunsthalle in Zürich, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York (MoMA), the Walker Art Center (USA) , the Centre Georges Pompidou (France), the Paris Museum of Modern Art (France), the Guggenheim Museum New York (USA), and the Museum of the 21st Century (Japan).

In June 2006 Universal International released a feature length documentary directed by Parreno and Scottish artist-filmmaker Douglas Gordon entitled Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait which premiered out of competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The film was inspired by Hellmuth Costard's 1970 film Football As Never Before about Manchester United legend George Best. Costard used eight 16mm film cameras to follow Best, in real time, for the course of an entire game against Coventry City and his film was screened by German broadcaster ARD in 1971.

Parreno has collaborated with other artists, curators and philosophers, including Pierre Huyghe, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Simon Critchley and lectured at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He wrote an article for the Summer 2009 (first) issue of Above magazine.