Philippe Parreno. Thenabouts

For his first solo exhibition in Australia, Philippe Parreno presents a singular retrospective of his filmic works as a cinematic ensemble.

In Thenabouts the artist’s films play with temporal and spatial boundaries, guiding the visitor through a complex journey of images, duration, and memory.

The experience is controlled live by a gallery technician and no two visits are ever the same.

Since 1988, when his first film Fleurs (1987) was presented as a background for a weather broadcast on French television, Philippe Parreno has sought to redefine the exhibition experience. Working with the exhibition itself as a medium, Parreno explores its possibilities beyond the presentation of individual works to create scripted spaces within which a series of events unfolds.

Parreno is a collaborative artist whose practice encompasses film, sculpture, drawing, and text. The dialogic nature of his work is evident in the films and exhibitions that have been produced through collaboration with artists, architects, musicians, composers and philosophers. Through work that draws on cinema, science fiction, architecture, the phantasmagorical, and the natural, Parreno merges reality and fiction to produce exhibitions that radically challenge our notions of reality and the passage of time.