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, which are scratched onto the film stock. Fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap within the film’s shots. Also included in the exhibition, 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 body and the Invisibleboy are characters that float between several layers of reality.
The Serpentine exhibition follows a series of related but distinct retrospectives of the artist’s work presented at Kunsthalle Zürich, 2009; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2009-2010; and the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on- Hudson, New York, 2010.
Philippe Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria and lives and works in Paris. Other major exhibitions of the artist’s work include: Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu, Japan, 2006; Kunsthalle Zürich, 2006; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2003; Musée d’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris, 2002, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2001.
Philippe Parreno
25 November 2010 – 13 February 2011
