Philippe Parreno:
Danny / No More Reality
The Tower
South Gallery, Level 0
Starting from
The gallery offers two exhibition spaces set in one another – Danny and No More Reality.
The first exhibition space, Danny takes its name from the comic character Danny the Street created by Grant Morrison in the early 90’s. Danny the Street is a living and sentient piece of urban geography who can magically and seamlessly place themshelf in any environment without any disruption to their landscape.
Parreno conceives Danny as a multi-part automaton living and moving in response to live data collected from its surroundings. An artificial pond, a mirrored shutter, and a futuristic, robotic sound-system are among the elements that define the choreographed space. Life simulation and artificial intelligence algorithms are integral to the ways Danny becomes manifest through endless, evolving movements and sonic structures.
A second exhibition space is the film entitled No More Reality. It brings together ten films of Parreno’s, previously known as Anywhere (2001), June 8th 1968 (2009), Invisible Boy (2010), C.H.Z. (2011) Marilyn (2012) The Crowd, (2015) Li Yan (2016) Anywhen, (2016), Owl in Daylight (2020), and Goya, (2021). The films have been merged into one another to form a single coherent narrative. Previously unseen footage has been edited to produce a new diegetic world. The film tells a story from a subjective perspective, as a character with a unique identity. This freely existing subjectivity passes from body to body throughout the film.
The ensemble of the two exhibition spaces is designed to host this specific film and produce a very particular acoustic space. Sound is not mixed using the traditional ambisonics of theatres. Instead, the room uses an active acoustics principle allowing the resonance of the room to be adjusted. The sound is hushed in comparison to a traditional cinema space, and it can resonate throughout the space. In No More Reality sound is never totally integrated to the moving image, tand the film’s characters become disembodied and present in the space. Through transonic presence the acoustics in which they exist within are shared with the audience.
For No More Reality, Parreno has collaborated with Darius Khondji, Director of Photography, Ael Dallier Vega, Editor and Nicolas Becker, Sound Supervisor. Danny has been constructed and programmed in the space by Johan Lescure, Alexander Dromgole, and Cengiz Hartlap.
Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno studied at École des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble, and Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He lives and works in Paris, France. Philippe Parreno is a French artist who rose to prominence in the 1990s, earning critical acclaim for his work that spans a diversity of media, including film, sculpture, drawing, and text.
Parreno radically redefined the exhibition experience by taking it as a medium, placing its construction at the heart of his process. Exploring the possibilities of the exhibition as a coherent “object” rather than as a collection of individual works, it becomes a true open space, a format that differs on each occasion, and a frame for things to appear and disappear. Parreno conceives his exhibitions as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. He seeks to transform the exhibition visit into a singular experience that plays with spatial and temporal boundaries and the sensory experience of the visitor who is guided through the space by the orchestration of sound and image. For the artist, the exhibition is less a total work of art than a necessary interdependence that offers an on-going series of open possibilities.