Philippe Parreno: Voices. A Collection of Spoken Works

Over the last 30 years, the French artist Philippe Parreno has radically redefined the experience of the exhibition by placing its construction at the heart of his process. Working with high-end technologies, film, and performance, he transforms galleries in choreographed spaces that follow a script where a series of unexpected albeit interconnected events unfold, thereby playing with the sensory experiences of the visitor who is guided through the space by the orchestration of sound and image. Pushing the boundaries between script and transcript, between document and memory one step further, the publication Voices consists of transcriptions of his films, audio works, and performances, transferring these seminal works (back) into written form. The collection of texts establishes a new perspective on Parreno’s practice, which has always been focused on revisiting and evolving his artworks from the past, and offers insight into the artist’s multi-faceted approach to language and the human voice. This is a dyslexia friendly book.PHILIPPE PARRENO (*1964, Oran) is one of the most influential French artists of the last decades. Through his multidisciplinary practice and astonishing films, including his iconic “marquees,” luminous objects that speak, glimpse, sing, and enter into dialogue with the visitors, Parreno creates artworks that question the boundaries between reality and fiction, and play with our understanding of time. He has transformed the monumental spaces of the Palais de Tokyo and Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Recent exhibitions include site-specific interventions in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, and the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Parreno lives and works in Paris