No two visits to the French artist Philippe Parreno’s new show H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, can ever be the same. The exhibition, which opens today, 11 June, is Parreno’s largest ever in the US. It is a constantly mutating presentation of films, light sculptures, performance and music—including live recitals by the pianist Mikhail Rudy—with a total running time of four to five hours.
The show is set up in the massive drill hall of the historic structure, and plays with the space’s proportions and acoustics. “The architecture becomes semi-conscious, in a way,” Parreno explained in a conversation with the exhibition’s co-curators, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alex Poots, and consulting curator Tom Eccles, before a press unveiling on 10 June.
One of the stranger moments comes in the form of Tino Sehgal’s performance piece Ann Lee (2011), in which four young girls emerge from a corner of the room and begin a scripted interaction with the audience, each simultaneously personifying the Manga character Annlee from Parreno’s film Anywhere Out of the World (2000), also on show. “OK, take care!” each girl chirps mechanically at the end of the piece.
But perhaps the most poignant piece is Parreno’s film June 8, 1968 (2009)—which recreates the train voyage that brought the assassinated Robert Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington, DC—announced with the jolting shift from music to the loud rhythmic chug of movement on the tracks. Projected on a large screen, it injects the darkened space with the lush green landscapes along the train’s journey, often peopled with silent and sombre onlookers.