“You always have to establish a relation between the production of form and the exhibition of form. For me, they are both totally dependent on each other. There is no object of art without its exhibition.” Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno places the fabrication of the exhibition at the heart of his process and approaches it through different formats on each occasion. The artist sometimes envisions the exhibition as a medium, and at other times as an artwork in its own right. A veritable open space, the exhibition is a format, a frame for things to appear and disappear: “You can put anything inside of it: a workshop, a protest, a video conference, a situation, a shadow play, a music hall act, a film, a thought structure, a local space…” Parreno explained in 1995.
Composed of installations, performances, concerts, and displays of objects and artworks, the exhibition is conceived as a construction site to explore new possibilities. The artist seeks to transform the exhibition visit into a singular experience that plays with spatial and temporal boundaries.
From Snow Dancing, his exhibition at the Consortium,Dijon (1995), to Alien Seasons at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2002), and including his latest exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2012) and at the
Serpentine Gallery in London (2010), Philippe Parreno finds new ways to configure the space and time of the artworks and their exhibition.