Philippe Parreno is a French artist who rose to prominence in the 1990s, earning critical acclaim for his work that spans a diversity of media including film, sculpture, drawing and text. A museum artist par excellence, Parreno confronts himself for the first time with the legacy of the cinema theatre. In one go, he also gives the concept of the ‘retrospective’ a completely new twist. Tate Modern senior curator Andrea Lissoni, who curated several major projects with Parreno, unravels his strategies.
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 a collection of individual works, this becomes a veritable open space, a format that differs on each occasion, and a frame for things to appear and disappear.
One of the most unique and challenging artists of our time, 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.
