Overview
Parreno creates autonomous (film)beings for exhibitions. As indicated by the title «May» he situates this exhibition in time. In an ongoing process of transformation of his works, Parreno finds his way to ever new formats and models for possible exhibition formats: the ghosts of his work return here as protagonists of their own identity.
The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which features works created between the 1990s and the present day, provides an insight into the work of the artist on several narrative and evocative levels: nine Marquee works created since 2007 transform the spaces into a glowing field of possible cinemas entrances. They resemble the light-bulb-bedecked canopies of the world’s entertainment culture and are complemented by the neon sign “Boy from Mars” (2005), which could be announcing the 2003 film of the same name also on view at the exhibition. A series of drawings runs through the entire exhibition as a parallel narrative: monsters, which the children’s book illustrator Johan Olander, who lives in New York, developed for the work of Philippe Parreno – interpretations of an oeuvre – mutate to funny, threatening, shocking and amusing ogres. They are redrawn by Parreno himself who performs a double somersault of interpretation here. Thus the monsters are in communication with works which allow language, stories branching out in all directions and fictions to be present as spirits: hundreds of balloons in the form of speech bubbles, glass speakers, puppets, photographs of the artist, who is speaking to animals, a film which has “produced a building” and numerous stories which the monsters from the drawings want to begin...
