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Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno

Directing

Biography

Philippe Parreno is a French contemporary artist, living and working in Paris. His works include films, installations, performances, drawings, and text. Parreno's work centers around both expanding ideas of time and duration through his artworks and distinctive conception of exhibitions as a medium. He began examining unique approaches to both narration and representation in the 1990s, and has been exhibiting internationally since. His early works include video-conference lectures incorporating footage from television shows and films. In 1999, Parreno collaborated with Pierre Huyghe to buy the copyright to a manga character named AnnLee and create a series of videos titled No Ghost Just a Shell. Other artists created works involving AnnLee, and their collective work culminated in a group exhibition. Parreno continued collaborating on films, creating Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which followed soccer player Zinedine Zidane through a 90-minute match, in 2006; and June 8, 1968, a film about the train that carried Robert Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington, in 2009.

Known For

Invisible Boy

A portrait of an illegal immigrant Chinese child through the imaginary monsters that incarnate his fears and anxieties. A fiction tacked onto a reality. The reality of the illegal aliens in Manhattan’s Chinatown. People who are called ‘invisible’. This portrait gives an image to someone who doesn’t have one and, at the same time, a real person gains the social identity he’s missing by becoming a fictional character. High definition images make sensible impressions of a city as we cross over to the imaginary. Fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap. Like Superman or Spiderman, Invisible Boy is a contemporary superhero produced by the city today. His monsters appear slowly, at the beginning as scratches on the film stock, someplace in between the diegesis and the actual world. They are the boy’s superpowers. This is a tale in which a boy’s paranoia produces a topographic vision of a city.

Invisible Boy

2010Movie
Chew the Fat

"Chew The Fat" (Informal) - To have a long friendly conversation with someone. In the film project 'Chew The Fat', the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, living in New York portraits a group of 12 artists (Douglas Gordon, Angela Bulloch, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez - Foerster, Elizabeth Peyton, Tobias Rehberger, Carsten Hoeller, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, Andrea Zittel, Maurizio Cattelan). The artists, all chosen by Tiravanija, belong to the same generation as himself and, like him, have advanced during the nineties to achieve international success. Most importantly, all are good friends of Tiravanija. This creates a particularly relaxed situation in which conversation can flow naturally between the two with personal issues coming up as easily and often as those to do with work or career.

Chew the Fat

2011Movie
No More Reality Whereabouts

This feature-length film combines 20 years of existing and re-edited footage to generate a 'film of films'; a hybrid that is both a non-exhaustive retrospective and the creation of a new persona through the symbiosis of its constituent parts. In the past decades, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by conceiving this as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. Now he explores the possibilities of the theatrical film screening as a coherent ’object’ rather than a collection of individual films. For the first time, Parreno presents a retrospective of his film works in the diegetic space of the cinema instead of the museum space. Parreno proposes a 'seance of cinema’ reintroducing in this traditional setting the magic and live rituals that lie at the basis of this art form.

No More Reality Whereabouts

2019Movie
Anywhen In a Time Colored Space

Anywhen In a Time Colored Space is a continuation of Philippe Parreno's Anywhen, filmed by renowned Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji and featuring the voice of Nina Conti, actor, comedienne and ventriloquist. Performing the artist’s own writing integrated with fragments of James Joyce, the amalgamation of words read by Conti makes explicit Parreno’s interest in artificial, digital, and organic matter, and particularly how these forms of life communicate. The film is comprised of long sequences of a live cuttlefish (Sepia Oficinalis — a Mediterranean species of cephalopod) that can change the surface of its body—responding to outside forces such as light, sound and vibration, seemingly projecting the thoughts contained in the monologue. Much of the film focuses on the cuttlefish, which Parreno first kept in a tank in his studio.

Anywhen In a Time Colored Space

2019Movie
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Stories are Propaganda was created by Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija for the Guangzhou Biennial in China. The artists documented the new city under construction on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou. A succession of fixed shots show black factory smoke, piles of trash, words written in the sand, and trees swaying in the wind. Flowing rapidly from general observations of the era to autobiographical details to self-reflection, poetic fragments unroll like snapshots: a Chinese magician making watches and clocks appear at night; a small albino rabbit floundering in a muddy puddle; a snowman made of mud; a shadow puppet silhouetted against the moon. Narrated by a child off-screen, the film creates a feeling of melancholy through its evocation of the end of the world’s ideologies. It is an inverted cinema made of scenes edited according to a temporal protocol.

Stories are Propaganda

2005Movie