Philippe Parreno, Haus der Kunst, Munich: The current curation of Haus der Kunst, driven by Andrea Lissoni is a subject of discussion among the staff and those preparing for the latest significant opening. The programme of exhibitions, how they move from one to the other, are constructed in this showcase building of the Nazi era with the engagement of the artist, including local manufacture and with a collaborative approach, is an overriding subject of those waiting for the opening of the exhibition.
This is Philippe Parreno’s latest show. Welcome to Art Gallery 2025, where traditional art constructions are recreated in a contemporary image with the vision of the auteur and the contribution of skilled craftspeople in media and object technologies. It is a show that feels like it is almost still in development. Fresh out of our technological age, we depend on machine conversations, generative digitality, and constructed artefacts like the rest of our lives. The ghosts of the human makers, ghosts of the living, wander, translating and communicating.
Parreno explains the structure of his approach. While the exhibition is entitled Voices, the central piece is a landscape. He calls his show ‘classical’ because it can be identified as a landscape – at the hub – and ten sculptures arranged in smaller rooms and areas, in front, off to the side and around. He also calls these sculptures ‘totems’, indicating their community purpose.
As a subject in its own right, the landscape became a recognised part of the staple of fine art galleries in the 16th century. Parreno is consciously reinterpreting it for the current digital age, where non-human autonomous visions are part of the vision adopted into his artistic language. This show relies upon much of the machine art tropes we have now become familiar with. One of these is the link between remote regions. His landscape is – and many have argued that this is basically what a landscape is – a window into another place in time and space. The bright, computer-backlit nature of the picture emphasises this windowness.
The physical space chosen by Parreno has been selected for its ecological narrative and its cinematic resonance. The desert of Almeria, familiar to Spaghetti Western enthusiasts for being the location of the cult movies of Sergio Leone, appears in large in the middle of the grand hall, constructed in high quality by multiple screens – to walk behind them feels like stepping into the middle of a computer, complete with large fans, and sturdy cables. This allows a projection that is not simply recorded on film but which can behave in response to digital information – and the screens to respond to the information of multiple cameras. However, the landscape is fundamentally a visual recording, an excellent study of an almond tree grove, El Almendra. Spectral data, information from changing wavelengths gathered at the scene, is also interwoven into the landscape, bringing a haunting essence from the activity of plants, creatures, and weather. With exhibition visitors sitting on benches watching the gently rocking changing view, I’m reminded of the Victorian obsession with sitting at a beauty spot. In those days, awe was obtained from craggy, dynamic views, crashing waterfalls and exhilarating drops, but here, the awe comes from our psychological state as witnesses of the climate crisis. Is this benign, green scene about to be lost forever? Is this the end game of the planet? Are we in the eye before the storm, standing at the edge of an ecological brink, about to collectively tip over and go past the point of no return? Perhaps we aren’t in a classic exhibition but a romantic one with a capital ‘R’.
Despite having a landscape at its centre, the exhibition has many more ancillary pieces, each of which stands alone, like a traditional sculptural piece. Most of these are responsive, interactive, triggered into different states by sensors and gates which switch states on and off, but overall with a slow, gentle time-arc that recalls to me personally the elegant slowed-down time of dance and holy spaces, in particular the devotional and mesmerising dance in South East Asia (I used to try dance Thai temple dance with my teacher Tum Tim when I was young so this is my reference). These modulating sculptures include 25 ceiling lamps that emit heat and stop when the room reaches a specific temperature. Others are light structures of resin and light in glass showcases that alternate the subject viewed in response to variables, a little like a machine-controlled take on classic Victorian illusion, Pepper’s ghost. Sometimes, you can see the contents of the glass cabinet; at other times, a wash of light, suggesting magnetic interference, reflects off the surface. Again, the changes are gentle, meaning that despite the apocalyptic undercurrent, the show’s overall vibe feels benign. The twilight of the rooms is soft rather than threatening. Communication outside of humans and even animals is possible and desirable. It will have a different form than what we expect. But it may not be harsh and violent, hurtful and painful; some elements are akin to hypnotic states and deep listening.
Parreno is happily moving between registers of popular culture; for example, his shocking pink book of words that accompanies the show at one point goes into a small discussion of the manga Dragon Ball Z. I would say that the dark, flickering show with the bright landscape at its core and its slow robotic movements is directly relating to the retro-futurism and science fiction. The movement between worlds reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s universes, although his world has no danger and darkness. Parreno’s world has more clement quality, and I think of Ursula Le Guin’s alternate universes and speculative anthropology. In the exhibition notes, Parreno says he is conscious of the non-separability of Satva (harmony), Raja (activity) and Tama (darkness) in the Hindu tradition, and it appears that this has been a guiding principle for his organisation here.
Although it is not aesthetically jarring and reflects the theme, one room has a different narrative. It is a film rather than an interactive piece (or at least not so). It shows close-ups and twisting images of Goya’s Pinturas Negras (1819-1823), fourteen paintings that he made of intense and haunting themes reflecting his bleak outlook at the end of his life. These paintings were created in his home and worked directly on his walls as murals. The paintings were hacked off and attached to canvas and are now exhibited at the Museo del Prado (Madrid). Goya was deaf when he made these images; the house where he created them and lived was called the Quinta del Sordo. The idea of these paintings entrances Parreno, their ghoulish faces staring across the room at each other; having been in visual communication and a single film, he has worked on trying to recreate something of their dark resonance in this original environment. With a soundtrack that emulates the crackling of fire or hellfire, I remembered the famous paintings and images of Goya’s candle hat. I wondered if Parreno was also influenced by ‘Goya’s Ghosts’ (2006). However, even this rather off-topic room encapsulated something of the general effort of the exhibition – the attempts to make a new language out of darkness, the space in between. I appreciate it when art makes the space to allow tangential ideas to come together to create from their juxtaposition.
Tino Sehgal, the choreographer who makes dance for museum settings, has developed his choreography, allowing human elements in dialogue with the mechanical and digital. A dancer, hair over her face, approached me to ask a question. She left the room and said she would return with an answer. I asked ‘What is choreography?’ After a few minute’s pause, an answer came from the speakers in the voice of well-known news anchor Susanne Daubner. Although unfamiliar, her voice had authority and presence as I don’t watch German-language television. But she was not concealed in some back room or recording the answer remotely. The answer was generated by software, and her voice was also generated by AI, presumably from preparation sessions in which she fed her voice data into the digital system. This was an effective strategy, and I enjoyed the interaction with the dancer who spoke to me from behind her hair.
Daubner’s voice adds humanity to the exhibition, which seems essential to the accessibility of the realm in which people are invited to commune with machines, ideas, future machines, and remote landscapes and organisms. Susanne Daubner seems an excellent choice, judging from the feedback from the German speakers who know her as a news anchor. She is well known and an essential voice in youth programming, so including her voice attracts a young audience. I like how Parreno puts humans into the coded digital show. As someone with experience in creative coding, I know that we often talk about putting the human back into this artistic experiment. Hence, people feel they have agency and a part in this brave new world. Parreno calls the ‘new language’ developed via machine learning for his show ‘∂A’ mixing fact with fiction, truth with imagination in a contemporary digital manner. Parreno’s approach is a fusion that can be facilitated through creative programming and inspired by combining diverse elements in an organised manner. But I am pleased that one of these elements is sculpture and light, the transparent resin casings working so atmospherically with the light, moving slowly through robotic pulleys and systems, casting moving lights around the room, inhabiting this Nazi-built monumental space with shadows of non-human and hopefully kinder entities.
Because Parreno is using current technology, the possibilities of digital interface, the effect of big data, coding and processing to create interactive artworks that alter depending on interference from other areas will inevitably reference and cross-relate to different exhibitions. So, although it’s new, it also has much in common with other artistic experiments in the 2020s and ideas familiar to us from the creative coding community. It is also good to see a similar human-centred approach, bringing humans into computer processing in a real-life environment in the gallery. It’s a time of experiment. The Haus der Kunst is doing it well by being open-ended and open; Parreno does it well, and so do Andrea Lissoni and his team.
Words/Photos: Jude Montague
Philippe Parreno VOICES Dec 13, 2024 – May 25, 2025