Philippe Parreno. Voices

Philippe Parreno revolutionised the experience of exhibitions. The French artist transforms galleries into choreographed spaces that follow a script, where all artworks are interconnected while a series of unexpected and interdependent events unfold.

Dancers control the exhibition and guide the visitors. A moving wall dances slowly. A tower antenna relays the soundscape of the exhibition and broadcasts stories from a remote land. Its heat is transmitted from blind lamps, its everyday life is screened. Two films fade in and out between flickering circular lights. Mechanical elements rise and fall, generating soundscapes from environmental data, processed and redistributed by the Brain – a customised super-computer. The hard symmetry of the building dissolves, forming a choreography of data, breaths and voices.

Artist Tino Sehgal has created a work consisting of dancers/singers speaking with the exhibition. Each room is activated one after the other by the dancers whose voices and ∂A - an invented language crafted by Parreno and evolving in real time - trigger responses from the whole environment. A very familiar, yet bodiless voice, periodically slips through the rooms. ∂A transforms the space, channelling messages through the dancers, who act as oracles of a prophecy.

In this cinematic landscape, events manifest, transform, and vanish like sequences in an infinite film. A new and invisible figure takes shape through an ongoing exchange of voices, sounds, and data, composed of images that move, moving images, and shadows. ARD anchor woman Susanne Daubner (Tagesschau) lent her voice to it. Her voice answers the dancers’ utterances, forming an ongoing exchange where the environment speaks back. The character’s humanlike sonic behaviour contrasts with its cybernetic core. It strives for growth and formulation, akin to a synthesizer modulating signals into sounds.

The exhibition “Voices”creates multiple living dialogues: with the visitors, between the rooms, and between Munich and a distant remote terrain in Almeria. What happens here also occurs there, in Spain, where a hybrid ecosystem of art, nature, and technology evolves in real-time. Echoes of voices expand the resonance of the exhibition beyond the building. They endlessly feed and reshape both the distant land and the exhibition, as living presences across distances.

“Voices”is a landscape in which remoteness is compressed, events are co-generated, interfaces disappear, humans and non-humans connect through new languages and the whole evolves and transforms relentlessly throughout time.

“Voices” has been co-programmed with Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul (28.2.–7.7.24). Two coordinated yet different exhibitions share co-commissioned works, a book collecting all voice-related texts by Philippe Parreno, a catalogue, and an overarching concept of cooperation across continents, cultures, and languages. In conjunction with the respective exhibitions, Haus der Kunst and Leeum Museum of Art present “Voices,” the first transcription collection comprising various voices in artworks by Philippe Parreno, written by the artist between 1990 and 2021.

The exhibition is supported by the K.S. Fischer Stiftung Hamburg, Ulli und Uwe Kai-Stiftung, and the Circle of Friends of Philippe Parreno. Voices.

Curated by Andrea Lissoni and Lydia Antoniou with Hanns Lennart Wiesner.

Credits

Sound Design
Nicolas Becker
mit
Cengiz Hartlap
Lexx (Bronze AI)
und den Stimmen von Isabel Sörling
und Johnny Rasse

Stimmmodell-Generierung
Pierre Lanchantin

Sprachentwicklung
David J. Peterson
Jessie Sams

Programmierung und Show Control
Johan Lescure
Guillaume Buisson
Matthieu Gasnier

Film El Almendral
Vincent Scotet
Flavio Manriquez
Brice Barbier
Luca Ungaro
Melia Roger
Liza Lamy

Atelier Philippe Parreno
Marie Auvity, Direktorin
Emilien Abibou
Aurélien Cané
Pattara Chanchuerachai
Alexandre Khondji
Thibault Zambeaux
Julie Pellegrin

Wir danken der Tagesschau-Sprecherin Susanne Daubner, die ihre Stimme für die Sprache ∂A (2024) geliehen hat, und dem Künstler Tino Sehgal für die Entwicklung neuer Live-Szenen für die Ausstellung im Haus der Kunst. Ein besonderer Dank gilt den Tänzer*innen und Sänger*innen Chris Scherer, Margherita D’Adamo, Emma Herschmann, Louise Höjer, Vera Pulido, Sandhya Daemgen, Leah Katz und Hanako Hayakawa sowie Cora Giannola, die die Arbeit ermöglicht haben.

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