Philippe Parreno

Anywhen, Tate Modern, November 2016 (05)

Porto 2016-17 Room 2 (34971247306)

Philippe Parreno (فيليب بارينو)

Philippe Parreno’s work is included in 'Une seconde d’éternité', a group show exploring the polysemic nature of time, and how the most fleeting moment can be felt with the fiercest intensity. Philippe Parreno’s work is included in 'Une seconde d’éternité', a group show exploring the polysemic nature of time and how the most fleeting moment can be felt with the fiercest intensity. Parreno has transformed the building's Rotunda into an almost weightless, timeless territory with Echo2: a Carte Blanche (2022) – a collaborative project between the artist and Arca, Nicolas Becker and Tino Sehgal. In this total environment, air and light, past, present and future, and reality and fiction commingle to a spectral, otherworldly effect. At the centre of the space is a projection of Philippe's video work, Anywhere Out of the World (2000), in which the fabled character Annlee becomes cognisant of her fictionality. The emancipation of Anlee's image is made concrete by the appearance of Annlee (2011), Tino Sehgal’s 'constructed situation', where young actresses come to incarnate her in the space, blurring the border between reality and fiction. From this diptych emerges the idea that a a fictional character – an image, a sign – can assume personhood, just like the human visitors it interacts with. This is not the only non-human agent at play: a 'bioreactor' takes control over the lights, sounds and movement at work in the space. Composed of yeast – microscopic, single-cell fungi – this bioreactor has a 'brain' of its own, with its evolution and actions conditioned by the temperature, noise, humidity, light outside the museum. In addition to the voices of Anlee, an infinite composition created in collaboration with the musician Arca spreads throughout the exhibition. Its lines are continually echoed and modified by an artificial intelligence, itself influenced by the atmospheric conditions and presence of visitors. Like a huge acoustic eardrum, the circular movement of a mobile wall sends back Annlee’s refrain. Heliostats, like firefiles, sweep the space of the Rotunda with refracted sunlight, making the perception of reality flicker and shift. Elsewhere, other works by Parreno enter into dialogue with the building, including his outdoor permanent work Mont Analogue (2001–2020) and film Marilyn (2012). We hear the disintergrating chant of Nuages gris (1881) by Franz Liszt, played on a Disklavier piano in Parreno's installation Quasi Objects: My room is a Fish Bowl, AC/DC Snakes, Happy Ending, II Tempo del Postino, Opalescent acrylic glass podium, Disklavier Piano (2014–2022), reminiscent of the scene from Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by Stanley Kubrick, where Tom Cruise kisses a dead body in a morgue to bring it back to life. The installation is regulated by an algorithm that configures the behaviour of the various 'quasi-objects'. The work is thus located in a tension between the random and the rational: while the programme controls certain triggers, the movement of the balloons is modified by the visitors. In the same way, time becomes elastic: the different works, some of which Parreno created years ago, become perpetually reborn. Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection Paris