E-Flux Press Release

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents A Time Coloured Space, a major exhibition by French artist Philippe Parreno, his first in Portugal. The exhibition will span 13 rooms, across two floors, occupying the Museum’s entire building.

 

 

International Archives 1st half of 2017

Philippe Parreno, A Time Coloured Space

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (Portugal)

03.02 - 07.05.2017

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© ArtCatalyse International / Marika Prévosto 2017. All Rights Reserved

A Time Coloured Space is conceived around the idea of the counterpoint, or ritornello, a principle whereby a particular passage is repeated at regular interludes within a musical arrangement to create compositional meaning, and structured on the mathematical model of the fugue. Governed by a similar method, A Time Coloured Space is determined not by its "objects," but by the regularity and rhythm of their appearance, featuring some of Parreno’s most emblematic work dating back to the 1990s.

Throughout his practice, Parreno has redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent "object" and a medium in its own right, rather than as a collection of individual works. To this end, he conceives his exhibitions as a scripted space in which a series of events unfold. Placed within the philosophical framework of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), each of the exhibition’s 13 rooms is a recurrence of the previous, differentiated only by variations in colour and arrangement. As the past and the future are inscribed into the present, the exhibition becomes an automaton, a factory in which to engineer these variables, and a form of imitation becomes a new invention.

Among the works that will form part of Parreno’s dramaturgy for Serralves are Speech Bubbles (1997–ongoing), Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and then December it’s Christmas (2008–16), an ongoing series of aluminium sculptures cast as snow-covered Christmas trees, and more than 180 of Parreno’s ink drawings, created between 2012 and 2015. The Auditorium of the Museum will be transformed into a form of "cinéma en permanence."

A recent addition to the Serralves Museum’s Collection, Quasi Objects: Marquee (cluster). Disklavier Piano. My Room is a Fish Bowl (2014) will serve as the exhibition’s master of ceremonies.

On Friday, February 3, to mark the launch of the exhibition, pianist Mikhail Rudy will perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s "Fugue, No. 24 in D-Minor."

Philippe Parreno: A Time Coloured Space is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, assisted by curator Filipa Loureiro.

 

Philippe Parreno © Andrea Rossetti

Exhibition 3 February - 7 May 2017. Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Rua D. João de Castro, 210 - 4150–417 Porto (Portugal). T +351 22 615 6500. Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10am–7pm, Saturday–Sunday 10am–8pm.