PRESENTATION: Philippe Parreno-Voices

Philippe Parreno radically redefined the exhibition experience by taking it as a medium, placing its construction at the heart of his process. Exploring the possibilities of the exhibition as a coherent “object” rather than as a collection of individual works, it becomes a veritable open space, a format that differs on each occasion, and a frame for things to appear and disappear.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Haus der Kunst Archive

 Philippe Parreno conceives his exhibitions as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. He seeks to transform the exhibition visit into a singular experience that plays with spatial and temporal boundaries and the sensory experience of the visitor who is guided through the space by the orchestration of sound and image. For the artist, the exhibition is less a total work of art than a necessary interdependence that offers an on-going series of open possibilities. In  his solo exhibition “Voices” at Haus der Kunst, Parreno explores the power of language by introducing ∂A, a new language crafted through machine learning and voiced by the renowned speaker Susanne Daubner. This language, merging news authenticity with Parreno’s imaginative realms, infuses the exhibition with an uncanny sense of truth. Parreno collaborates with artist Tino Sehgal to develop a new component of the exhibition  in  which  human  bodies  trigger  ongoing  dialogues  with  its  elements, becoming fully part of it. Their vocalisations, ranging from guttural sounds to melodic phrases, interact with the environment, causing lights to flicker, objects to whir, and surfaces to ripple. Daubner’s voice, though unseen, engages with the dancers, blurring the lines between human and artificial. The space evolves into a living environment, with Parreno’s quasi-objects responding to the performers. Museum apparatus, on loan from diverse local institutions – through an invitation to sustainability and collaboration by Haus der Kunst – are transformed into Parreno’s conducting tools. They blink and reveal even more elements of his environment, while inviting visitors to reflect on traditional forms of exhibition display. “Voices” extends beyond Haus der Kunst into a parallel rural landscape, captured and broadcast in real-time, creating a film that blends reality and fiction. Philippe Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria. Throughout his career, he has worked collaboratively with other artists in all manner of mediums. His collaboration “Sibéria” (1988), a mix of television images, photographs by Pierre Joseph, and paintings by Bernard Joisten. He worked again with Joseph and Joisten, as well as with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, on “Ozone” (1990), which features a series of images stitched together from disparate sources. In “No More Reality” (1991–93), Parreno gave “video conference” lectures incorporating footage from television shows such as “Alf and Twin Peaks”, and movies such as Tim Burton’s “Batman: (1989). In his film “La Nuit des héros” (1994), an art historian played by television star Yves Lecoq goes mad, and in “L’Ordre du discours” (1994), Lecoq reads a speech for the inauguration of the Galeries Contemporaines des Musées de Marseilles. Parreno continued to work with the idea of Lecoq as a public figure in projects such as “Un Homme public: (1994–95), in which a little girl plays the role of a sort of counter-personality to Lecoq; positioned as the viewer on the receiving end of television feed, she speaks of the “revenge” she is taking on network television itself. The film “Vicinato” (1995) was a collaboration with Carsten Höller and Rirkrit Tiravanija, based on a conversation between the three artists. The speaking roles have been juggled in the film version and actors portray the artists to confuse attribution of authorship. In 1996, Parreno collaborated with Pierre Huyghe on “L’Histoire d’un sentiment”, a deliberately unfinished film script. In 1997, they produced one issue of a faux magazine titled “Anna Sanders. Speech Bubbles” (1997), also from this period, is a sculptural installation featuring a number of cartoonlike speech bubbles suspended from a gallery ceiling. In 1999, Parreno and Huyghe devised “No Ghost Just a Shell”, in which the rights to the character Annlee, a Japanese manga cartoon character , were purchased and licensed by the artists, “shared” with other artists (who did their own projects based upon her), and then ultimately given to the character herself. His “El Sueño de una cosa” (2001), consists of a 60-second film, the white panels on which the film is projected, and the silence that follows. The moving-image element consists of brilliant postcard views of a Norwegian hillside, set to music by French composer Edgar Varèse; next to it, a glow-in-the dark label provides the work’s title. The seven white panels that act as a screen, revealed after the lights go up, are a replication of Robert Rauschenberg‘s “White Painting” (1951). During the 4 minutes and 33 seconds before the film starts again, viewers might imagine experiencing a sort of disembodied version of John Cage’s “4-minute 33-second silent score” (1962; itself inspired in part by Rauschenberg’s painting). But this is just how the work is shown in a gallery context; the film component was originally conceived for movie theaters throughout Sweden in 2001, shown between advertisements and the feature films. Duplicating exactly the duration of the ads, it was an “alien” intrusion into the realm of commerce and entertainment. Other projects by Parreno include “Untitled” (2002), a sculptural undertaking with Jorge Pardo, and “Sodium Dreams” (2003), with Gonzalez-Foerster, Huyghe, and a number of other artists. Parreno also collaborated with Douglas Gordon to produce the ninety-minute film “Zidane: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait” (2006). In 2008, Parreno affixed a giant, brightly lit marquee to the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Photo: Philippe Parreno, Marquee, 2021, Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

Info: Curators: Andrea Lissoni and Lydia Antoniou with Hanns Lennart Wiesner, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich, Germany, Duration: 13/12/2024-25/5/2025, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-20:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, www.hausderkunst.de/