Philippe Parreno | ArtReview
Philippe Parreno, Voices, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
by Martin Herbert
Philippe Parreno’s exhibitions are often initially experienced as a destabilising encounter with otherness. So, at the risk of blowing that for anyone who hasn’t seen Voices – a version of which, to be fair, was shown earlier in 2024 at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul – here’s what a first wander through is like. Haus der Kunst’s huge, darkened, neoclassical main space, flanked by smaller ones on either side and at the back, is dominated by an evolving film on a screen, El Almendral (2024), an updating stream of footage from an almond grove and surrounding landscape in Almería, Spain; almond trees tolerate drought, and this region is steadily undergoing desertification due to climate change. The smaller spaces offer a stop-start scenography of Parreno’s increasingly trademark light- and sound-based sculptures, mostly new, a few dating back years. Among them are a trio of bobbly glass sculptures, shaped like giant peanut shells and containing coloured lights, that slide up and down steel poles and cast rippling, austerely psychedelic patterns on the walls; a 5 × 5 grid of blinking globular heat lamps strung from the ceiling – heat being a leitmotif of the show – and suspended, intermittently rotating speakers that softly emit an aleatory soundscape of droning, muttering and chirring. The latter is part of an overall soundscape divided across the rooms, Voices (2024), which clones and sometimes completely abstracts speech by well-known German TV presenter Susanne Daubner. In each case, here, it feels like something is being transmitted in a language halfway alien, halfway familiar.