Artists

Philippe Parreno

Press release

Philippe Parreno revolutionised the experience of exhibitions. The French artist transforms galleries into choreographed spaces that follow a script, where all artworks are interconnected while a series of unexpected and interdependent events unfold.

Dancers control the exhibition and guide the visitors. A moving wall dances slowly. A tower antenna relays the soundscape of the exhibition and broadcasts stories from a remote land. Its heat is transmitted from blind lamps, its everyday life is screened. Two films fade in and out between flickering circular lights. Mechanical elements rise and fall, generating soundscapes from environmental data, processed and redistributed by the Brain – a customised super-computer. The hard symmetry of the building dissolves, forming a choreography of data, breaths and voices.

Artist Tino Sehgal, friend and longtime collaborator of Philippe Parreno, has created a work consisting of dancers/singers speaking with the exhibition. Each room is activated one after the other by the dancers whose voices and ∂A - an invented language crafted by Parreno and evolving in real time - trigger responses from the whole environment. A very familiar, yet bodiless voice, periodically slips through the rooms. The landscape is channeling messages to the visitors through the dancers, who appear as oracles of a prophecy.

In this cinematic landscape, events manifest, transform, and vanish like sequences in an infinite film. A new and invisible figure takes shape through an ongoing exchange of voices, sounds, and data, composed of images that move, moving images, and shadows. ARD anchor woman Susanne Daubner (Tagesschau) lent her voice to it. Her voice answers the dancers’ utterances, forming an ongoing exchange where the environment speaks back. The character’s humanlike sonic behaviour contrasts with its cybernetic core. It strives for growth and formulation, akin to a synthesizer modulating signals into sounds.