The Serpentine Gallery presents Philippe Parreno’s
first solo exhibition
in a public institution in the UK. 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. Taking the
exhibition as a medium, Parreno has
sought to redefine the exhibition experience by
exploring its possibilities beyond a
collection of individual works.
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 a timeline of orchestrated sound and image.
Noise from Kensington Gardens is
heard inside, as though the outside is leaking into
the Gallery. The window blinds
move automatically to reveal sudden change of
weather.
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
Invisibleboy by Philippe Parreno at Serpentine Gallery, London
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- Elena Sommariva
- 26 November 2010