Philippe Parreno
SYNCHRONICITY
Rockbund Art Museum
2017, July 8 - Sep. 17
Installation views Philippe Parreno, Synchronicity, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
© Philippe Parreno
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum
Photo © Andrea Rossetti
Synchronicity is a major solo exhibition of the French artist, Philippe Parreno.
Curated by Larys Frogier, this exhibition is dedicated to the late Xavier Douroux (1956-2017), co-founder and director of Le Consortium in Dijon (France), of whose influence on Parreno's career cannot be overstated.
Over the past twenty years, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a medium in its own right. Curated in dialogue with the physicality and functionality of the museum’s architecture, the exhibition alters the building’s current existence through an unexpected use of time, space, light, and sound to become a semi automated puppet, a perpetual motion of events in which Parreno subverts the conventions of the exhibition space.
Philippe Parreno’s first exhibition in China stretches through the museum’s six floors, also extending to its glass rooftop floor and its connection to the sun.
As Larys Frogier, states: “Parreno invites visitors to engage with contradictory notions of the physical, emotional, and conceptual. He blurs the distinction between reality and fiction to create an all-encompassing world of endless possibilities”. By manipulating light, shadow, and duration, Parreno engages visitors through a constantly evolving space. The artist covered various windows of the renovated Art Deco building with blinds that act as eyelids to the building, opening and closing in different locations, and to variable time sequences – each gallery space shifts from darkness to twilight, and then to full light. Some blinds ar activated using motors. But for the very first time, the artist is working with ‘dalang’ performers to operate the remainder.
A ‘dalang’ refers to the puppeteer in an Indonesian Wayang performance; traditionally controlling the white screen and lighting that together create the shadow puppets that make up the performance.
On the museum’s glass rooftop, Parreno installed a heliostat that directs sunlight into the fourth floor space in a carefully choreographed ensemble of natural light that dances in sync with the movement of the blinds. On the first floor lobby is a rotating secret bookcase door. On the second floor, alongside a large-scale screen playing a new rendition of Parreno’s 2000 film Anywhere Out Of the World. On the third floor, next to a wall displaying a new series of Parreno’s Fade to Black fluorescent silkscreened posters.
For the new rendition of Parreno’s animated film Anywhere Out Of the World, the 2D manga heroine who featured in the opening series of the artist’s 1999 collaborative project, ‘No Ghost Just A Shell’, is re-appearing in stereoscopic 3D, with new narration. An illuminated glass marquee placed at the 3rd floor of the exhibition will play a tune that resonates throughout the entire building.
From the appearance of a film to the disappearance of an image, to a song sung by the dalangs: Parreno is choreographing the Rockbund Art Museum.
Captation of a suspended moment during the show Philippe Parreno, Synchronicity, 2017, Rockbund Art Museum
Publication
