Philippe Parreno: Prolific Portal to the Paranormal
This is Philippe Parreno’s world, and we are all just conjured to be in it.
Words by Viola Raikhel | Photography by Brigitte Lacombe
In the shapeshifting cosmos of Philippe Parreno’s work, boundaries are more than blurred – they are undone entirely. Time folds in on itself, exhibitions breathe like sentient beings, and the very idea of the viewer is dismissed in favour of a subtler, stranger dance between space and presence.
“I don’t really like the word ‘audience’,” Parreno tells me, calmly dismantling the very premise of spectatorship. “Audience means you assume you know what people want – and that’s a problem.” For the artist who has never merely mounted exhibitions but orchestrated atmospheric phenomena, ghostly, choreographed, often cinematic experiences, Parreno’s world is not created for us. We are invited only to wander within it, temporarily occupying a landscape of suggestion, absence and unknowability.
Few artists dare to dismantle the systems we use to define art, exhibition and reality itself. Philippe Parreno is one of them. For more than three decades, the French conceptualist has crafted works that dissolve boundaries between the real and the imagined, past and present, with sculptures that breathe and films that vanish.
“I start with people. The people who invite me to create something, the site, the architecture, the history around it... These are my collaborators,” he reveals.
Philippe Parreno, VOICES, exhibition view, Haus der Kunst München, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Philippe Parreno, Membrane, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024. ⓒ Philippe Parreno. Photo credit: Andrea Rossetti
In Parreno’s world, the traditional role of the spectator collapses under the weight of something more uncanny. We are not there to observe, but to be absorbed. In his recent appointment as Artistic Director of the Okayama Art Summit 2025, the international contemporary art exhibition held every three years in Japan’s Okayama City, Parreno has chosen Japanese artist Shimabuku for the role of Artistic Translator. He has emphasised the importance of an Artistic Translator who shares the sense of the exhibition concept, in order to connect it with others.
“I am interested in re-enchanting public spaces, to blur the boundary between fiction and reality,” he says of the Okayanma appointment.
For Parreno, the exhibition space is not a neutral container but a medium in itself – one capable of guiding, haunting and revealing. “Yes, totally,” he nods in agreement. “At the beginning, there was a common trunk between cinema, sacralism and exhibition. And then the world divided itself into boxes: storytelling went to cinema, object display to exhibitions and the unconscious to religion. But before all that, exhibitions were spaces of narrative and experience. They had the power to transform.”
This interest in pre-modern, pre-classified spaces echoes throughout his work. In Munich’s Haus der Kunst, he created a living exhibition that shifted with time, light and human presence. “In those kinds of spaces, the other, the guide is there before you, not in space, but in time,” he reflects. “It’s not like a theatre, where the person in front of you blocks the subtitles. In my exhibitions, the other is someone who knows a bit more than you and is there to accompany you into the unknown.”
It’s in this unknown – the paranormal, the liminal, the nearly imperceptible – that Parreno takes us. “Art was always, for me, about dealing with presence and absence,” he explains. “I started with video, and my earliest works had to be rewound before they could play again. So the work was never there all the time – it had to disappear in order to come back. That on-and-off rhythm... that’s where I live.”
When asked if this sense of ‘otherness’ often present in his work is a form of quiet resistance to societal structures, I hear him smile: “Maybe. The exhibition space offers a different rhythm, a different logic. One that doesn’t require resolution. The other, in the exhibition, is a guide into your near future.”
Parreno’s conceptual depth is matched by a personal kind of poeticism. In rapid-fire questions, he reveals himself in glimpses. When asks about the state of mind he prefers to work in, he replies: “I wish to feel reassured… but I never am.” And his current artistic obsession? “I’m editing a feature film about a woman who disappears. I don’t fully understand it yet. I’m obsessed with trying to find the story.” If he could turn one of his artworks into a living being, it would be Frankenstein’s monster: “A kind, literate, vegan creature that people hate simply because he was never born.”
His admiration for other artists is generous. “I’ve been lucky to work with so many incredible people,” he says, naming Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller and Rirkrit Tiravanija as friends and co-conspirators. And his imaginary collaborators? “They change all the time. Right now, I’m thinking a lot about [Romanian historian] Mircea Eliade.”
Why Eliade, you wonder? His theory implies the entire world’s power lies in the cosmogony. If the sacred established all valid patterns in the beginning, during the time recorded in myth, then the mythical age is sacred time, the only time that contains any value.
At the Okayama Art Summit 2025, which will run from 26 September to 24 November 2025, these ideas are coalescing into a public dreamscape. “I started imagining an exhibition that would exist entirely outdoors. It started like a garden. Then I invited artists, musicians, even scientists. We build it idea by idea, with no clear plan. Eventually it becomes this… weird world.”
For all his mystique, Parreno resists mythologising himself. When asked what a retrospective of his work might look like, he brushes it off: “It’s hard to see yourself from the outside. I know there are patterns, protocols, a grammar, but for me, it’s always the next thing that matters more than the former. In what I do, there’s a seed of what I will do. What I did is the past. Hopefully, what I do next is still the future.”
In a culture obsessed with clarity, Philippe Parreno invites us instead to dwell in uncertainty, to listen for the things that whisper, flicker or vanish before our eyes. To seek out the known and the unknown. His art doesn’t just resist categorisation; it bends time, warps logic, and asks us to believe that even within the most conceptual of frameworks, something magical, something paranormal can still occur.
We are not just viewers of his work. We are, perhaps, the very spirits it summons.
Viola Raikhel-Bolot is a Sydney-based art advisor and co-founder of 1858 Ltd.