WHAT IS A COLLECTIVE?
AN EVENING WITH PHILIPPE PARRENO

Philippe Parreno is known for extraordinary, atmospheric exhibitions, in which everything always seem to be in transit, as effects of media, formats and processes that draw on both machinic, biological and subjective temporalities. For Parreno, an exhibition is never simply a display of objects, but a specific way of organizing time. Often associated with so-called “relational art”, the situations he constructs tend to open up questions concerning various forms of social or collective being. For this evening at the Logan Center Performance Penthouse, Philippe Parreno will discuss these and other issues in conversation with Ina Blom and Jörn Schafaff. The event will feature a screening of three of Parreno’s short films – Credits (2000), The Crowd (2015) and June 8, 1968 (2009), which all touch on questions of collectives, although in very different ways.

Philippe Parreno studied at École des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble, and Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Treating his exhibitions as coherent „objects” rather than as collections of individual works, his practice spans a diversity of media – from film, sculpture and drawing to sound and text. His recent solo exhibitions include: Philippe Parreno, Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018); Two Automatons for One Duet, The Art Institute, Chicago (2018); H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, Park Avenue Armory, New York (2015); Anywhere, Anywhere Out Of The World, Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2013). In 2006 he directed the feature length film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait in collaboration with Douglas Gordon.

Ina Blom is Wigeland Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and Professor at the Dept. of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She is the author of, among other, On The Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture (2007) and The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016).

Jörn Schafaff is an art historian based in Berlin. He is the author of Philippe Parreno: Angewandtes Kino [Applied Cinema] (2010), the first monograph ever written about Parreno’s work. His most recent book is Rirkrit Tiravanija: Set, Szenario, Situation. Werke 1987 – 2005 (2018). English editions of both publications are projected for 2019.

Presented by the Department of Art History, UChicago Arts, France Chicago Center, the Department of Visual Arts, and the Department of Cinema Studies.

This event is free and open to the public.

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Tags: Chicago, Department of Art History at The University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts at The University of Chicago, Hyde Park, Ina Blom, Jörn Schafaff, Logan Center for the Arts, Philippe Parreno, WHAT IS A COLLECTIVE?