b. 1964, Oran, Algeria

Philippe Parreno was born on September 14, 1964, in Oran, Algeria. Throughout his career, he has worked collaboratively with other artists in all manner of mediums, his first such project being Sibéria (1988), a mix of television images, photographs by Pierre Joseph, and paintings by Bernard Joisten. He worked again with Joseph and Joisten, as well as with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, on Ozone (1990), which features a series of images stitched together from disparate sources. In No More Reality (1991–93), Parreno gave “video conference” lectures incorporating footage from television shows such as Alf and Twin Peaks and movies such as Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). In his film La Nuit des héros (1994), an art historian played by television star Yves Lecoq goes mad, and in L’Ordre du discours (1994), Lecoq reads a speech for the inauguration of the Galeries Contemporaines des Musées de Marseilles. Parreno continued to work with the idea of Lecoq as a public figure in projects such as Un Homme public (1994–95), in which a little girl plays the role of a sort of counter-personality to Lecoq; the viewer on the receiving end of television feed, she speaks of the “revenge” she is taking on network television itself. The film Vicinato (1995) was a collaboration with Carsten Holler and Rirkrit Tiravanija, based on a conversation between the three artists. The speaking roles have been juggled in the film version and actors portray the artists to confuse attribution of authorship. In 1996, Parreno collaborated with Pierre Huyghe on L’Histoire d’un sentiment, a deliberately unfinished film script. In 1997, they produced one issue of a faux magazine titled Anna Sanders. Speech Bubbles (1997), also from this period, is a sculptural installation featuring a number of cartoonlike speech bubbles suspended from a gallery ceiling. In 1999, Parreno and Huyghe devised No Ghost Just a Shell, in which AnnLee, a Japanese manga cartoon character, was bought and licensed by the artists, “shared” with other artists (who did their own projects based upon her), and then ultimately given the rights to herself. Recent projects by Parreno include Untitled (2002), a sculptural undertaking with Jorge Pardo, and Sodium Dreams (2003), with Gonzalez-Foerster, Huyghe, and a number of other artists.

Parreno has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Hamburg (1995), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998 and 2002), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2001), and Kunstverein München in Munich (2004), among other venues. His work has also appeared in the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2003), Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (1997 and 2003), Let’s Entertain at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2000), Istanbul Biennial (2001), and The Big Nothing at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (2004). He lives and works in Paris.