Introduction

Philippe Parreno has transformed the Bourse de Commerce Rotunda into an almost weightless territory, one that is outside of the world, outside of time. In it he brings together different temporalities and climates—the present of a summer season and the undefined future of a winter to come. The various elements become indistinct and intermingled: air and light; past, present, and future; and reality and fiction, generating new kinds of sensations affecting the visitors’ bodies and bending the structure towards an immaterial state.

In a continuous movement that creates the illusion of life and conjures up recollections of the island in The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, inhabited by unusual ghosts produced by an illusion-machine that endlessly captures and records those images created in mirrors by giving them olfactory, thermal, and tactile sensations; the exhibition space becomes unstable, set in motion by the movement and metamorphosis of images and sounds. In the scenario proposed by Tino Sehgal, the character of Annlee, like the holographic apparitions of the island’s inhabitants, seems to disappear into thin air before being reincarnated for a while on a mirage-like screen or in a new body.

In addition to Annlee’s voices, a sound wave also spreads throughout the space: this is Echo, an infinite composition created in collaboration with the musician Arca (alongside Nicolas Becker and Bronze), whose lines are continually modified and replayed by an artificial intelligence influenced both by atmospheric conditions and the presence of visitors. In response to this perpetually disordered cycle, we find the inevitability of the circular movement of a wall, which, like a skewed sundial, both invents a silent choreography and contains, like a huge acoustic eardrum, Annlee’s repeated refrain. Heliostats, like giant fireflies, also sweep the space of the Rotunda with refracted sunlight, making our perception of reality flicker and shift. The metabolism of a bioreactor, a nonhuman brain, and the fermentation of the living afford a new status to these images and the environment, triggering new forms of perception and life, the traces of a future to come.
Text by Emma Lavigne, CEO of the Pinault Collection

Other works by Parreno enter into the dialogue in other spaces of the Bourse de Commerce, including the video works Anywhere Out of The World (2000) and Marilyn (2012), the installation Quasi Objects: My Room is a Fish Bowl, AC/DC Snakes, Happy Ending, Il Tempo del Postino, Opalescent acrylic glass podium, Disklavier Piano (2014–2022) and the outdoor permanent work Mont Analogue (2001-20).