Introduction

Philippe Parreno solo exhibition May was the first episode from a series of “retrospective” exhibitions. The other episodes, which presented in succession by the artist, were shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (3 June to 7 September 2009), the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (4 November 2009 to 24 January 2010) and the CCS, Bard College, New York (Spring 2010). Parreno developed a specific “image” for each of the named institutions based on a particular aspect of his oeuvre. Over the course of the past 20 years Philippe Parreno produced a varied and complex body of work which is full of references, mental evocations and arguments relating to variants from literature, philosophy, science fiction, film, theatre and information formats such as radio, television and the internet.

“This film lasts for 11 minutes and 40 seconds but 48 hours after being removed from its sealed package it will disappear from the support through a process of oxidation. The film has stereo sound and a song featured at the end. There are no computer generated special effects in this production. What you see in the picture was constructed in order to be filmed. This is a story of a film that produced a building and the story of an architecture which provided the scenario for a film. The film is one element of a two-headed mutant, one of two inseparable twins who share the same body. The building does exist somewhere in South East Asia.”

Philippe Parreno wrote this short text for the film The Boy from Mars (2003), which he screened at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York in 2005. He left DVDs of the film on a bookcase and presented them to the viewers as a gift. The film, which dissolved two days after being removed from its package, formed a work along with the bookcase, which blocked the entrance to the exhibition in the gallery. The bookcase wall could be opened like a swing door using a mysterious lock mechanism – if the viewers managed to find it – and provided access to a room in which the collaborative work of Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija was on display.

The above-described installation and aforementioned film represent central themes in the work of the artist. An outstanding feature of Parreno’s work is the transformation of genres, in particular film, into visual art. Another important aspect is the exploration of the topic of the exhibition in itself. An artist’s “retrospective” must, therefore, make it possible to experience the exhibition as the central object of his analysis and is more than a mere list of chronologically relevant and representative works.

Parreno creates situations that allow things to assume a different form and through which playful new elements are established in visual art. These things are nurtured by the spirits of formats that are alien to art: he allows them to become cinema, philosophy, literature, science and fictions and embraces and involves mutants and hybrids, the imagination of creatures and beings that constantly change their form in our imaginations and perceptions. These include fairies, monsters, freaks, spirits and ghosts, phantoms, ventriloquists, doppelganger, hypnotists and seers, children, robots and other intelligent machines. In Parreno’s works, these all use fairytale, film and collective creativity to practice imaginatively transformed and theoretically-founded criticism of the conventional forms of exhibits and exhibitions.