Philippe Parreno

A portrait of an illegal immigrant Chinese child through the imaginary monsters that incarnate his fears and anxieties. A fiction tacked onto a reality. The reality of the illegal aliens in Manhattan’s Chinatown. People who are called ‘invisible’. This portrait gives an image to someone who doesn’t have one and, at the same time, a real person gains the social identity he’s missing by becoming a fictional character. High definition images make sensible impressions of a city as we cross over to the imaginary. Fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap. Like Superman or Spiderman, Invisible Boy is a contemporary superhero produced by the city today. His monsters appear slowly, at the beginning as scratches on the film stock, someplace in between the diegesis and the actual world. They are the boy’s superpowers. This is a tale in which a boy’s paranoia produces a topographic vision of a city.

Halfway between a sports documentary and an conceptual art installation, "Zidane" consists in a full-length soccer game (Real Madrid vs. Villareal, April 23, 2005) entirely filmed from the perspective of soccer superstar Zinedine Zidane.

"Chew The Fat" (Informal) - To have a long friendly conversation with someone. In the film project 'Chew The Fat', the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, living in New York portraits a group of 12 artists (Douglas Gordon, Angela Bulloch, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez - Foerster, Elizabeth Peyton, Tobias Rehberger, Carsten Hoeller, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, Andrea Zittel, Maurizio Cattelan). The artists, all chosen by Tiravanija, belong to the same generation as himself and, like him, have advanced during the nineties to achieve international success. Most importantly, all are good friends of Tiravanija. This creates a particularly relaxed situation in which conversation can flow naturally between the two with personal issues coming up as easily and often as those to do with work or career.

“Le Pont du Trieur”, co-written by de Meaux and Philippe Parreno, with an original score by Dave Stewart, is set in Pamir, a region situated in the highest part of Tajikistan, at the border between Afghanistan and China. This is a strategic zone controlled by various armies in the midst of a region that awaits reconstruction. The film stems from the simple question of how to tell the story of a country of which the West is deprived of images. Both fiction and documentary, it is about reality and the means of telling it.

Anywhen In a Time Colored Space is a continuation of Philippe Parreno's Anywhen, filmed by renowned Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji and featuring the voice of Nina Conti, actor, comedienne and ventriloquist. Performing the artist’s own writing integrated with fragments of James Joyce, the amalgamation of words read by Conti makes explicit Parreno’s interest in artificial, digital, and organic matter, and particularly how these forms of life communicate. The film is comprised of long sequences of a live cuttlefish (Sepia Oficinalis — a Mediterranean species of cephalopod) that can change the surface of its body—responding to outside forces such as light, sound and vibration, seemingly projecting the thoughts contained in the monologue. Much of the film focuses on the cuttlefish, which Parreno first kept in a tank in his studio.

40-minute film recreating the country house owned by Francisco de Goya, presented in installation as part of the Beyeler Foundation's 25th anniversary celebrations

Shot on a small island above the artic circle, this one minute film uncovers an unreal landscape. Each presentation of the film is a new tale. El sueno de una cosa (the dream of a thing) is a game that produces new stories each time it is played; these are the stories of a film in a permanent pre-production stage.

This feature-length film combines 20 years of existing and re-edited footage to generate a 'film of films'; a hybrid that is both a non-exhaustive retrospective and the creation of a new persona through the symbiosis of its constituent parts. In the past decades, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by conceiving this as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. Now he explores the possibilities of the theatrical film screening as a coherent ’object’ rather than a collection of individual films. For the first time, Parreno presents a retrospective of his film works in the diegetic space of the cinema instead of the museum space. Parreno proposes a 'seance of cinema’ reintroducing in this traditional setting the magic and live rituals that lie at the basis of this art form.