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4/4/2007

Philippe Parreno

Haunch of Venison Yard, London

What Do You Believe, Your Eyes or My Words?

Haunch of Venison is to present the first solo exhibition of internationally acclaimed French artist Philippe Parreno in London. In an exhibition entitled What do you believe, your eyes or my words? Parreno will explore how subjectivity moulds our experience of the real. In February, Parreno will deliver a lecture to a large colony of Magellan penguins on a beach in Patagonia. Scripted by Parreno, the lecture will be performed as day becomes night and will be documented by a large-format infra-red photograph. An audio recording of Parreno speaking to the penguins will also be made available as a podcast on the Haunch of Venison website and on other sites, such as youtube.

Parreno’s work revolves around the production of realities. Working in a variety of media from the traditional such as drawing and sculpture, to the more experimental including animation and performance, the artist debunks the idea of a singular, authentic reality, instead exploring a number of different – but equally valid – perceptions of it. Previous works such as Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (co-directed with Douglas Gordon), have examined this idea through the conflation of dramatically different perspectives. Others such as the collaborative AnnLee project – in which a Japanese Manga character is liberated from the binds of intellectual copyright – have deliberately blurred reality and fiction in an effort to unsettle claims to objective experience.

The penguin photograph in the exhibition will be complemented by a series of five illuminated drawings made on clear acetate in the style of traditional cartoons. Featuring an arrangement of words, plans, images and ideas, the drawings will change daily, with each cell replaced by the next one in the series resulting in a slow-motion, frame-byframe animation that unfolds over the course of the exhibition. A dark cloud made of numerous helium balloons in the shape of speech bubbles will hover on the ceiling of the top floor gallery. Previous incarnations of Parreno’s Speech Bubbles project have used white balloons, encouraging the viewer to make their private thoughts public by projecting their own utterances onto the blank forms. Produced in black for the first time, the balloons in the Haunch of Venison installation suggest the articulation of sinister words and shadowy thoughts. Their end-point is the impossibility of communication.

A new, limited-edition publication from Walther König entitled Suicide in Vermillion Sands will be launched to coincide with the exhibition. Inspired by the true story of a teenager in the late 1980s who returned to the housing estate where he grew up to kill himself, the book contains 180 t-shirt transfers commissioned by Parreno, each individually designed by an artist or graphic designer with whom he collaborates. Parreno describes the book as ‘psychotropic’, an object that reacts to the user’s behaviour. By systematically destroying the book – removing the transfers and ironing them on to t-shirts – the reader effectively becomes the principal character in the story of their own eventual demise.

Running concurrently with Philippe Parreno’s exhibition at Haunch of Venison in London is Learn to Read, a group exhibition about word and image at Tate Modern, May–June 2007. At this year’s Venice Biennale, Parreno will present a major new work in the Arsenale exhibition curated by Robert Storr. A major commission, Il Tempo del Postino, will be directed by Parreno and co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist for the inaugural Manchester International Festival, July 2007. Parreno also has a number of key solo exhibitions planned for 2008, including at the Serpentine in London, the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center.

Haunch of Venison
6 Haunch of Venison Yard - London
Free admission

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