b. 1964, Oran, Algeria

Philippe Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria. Throughout his career, he has worked collaboratively with other artists in all manner of mediums. His collaboration 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; positioned as 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 Höller 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 the rights to the character Annlee, a Japanese manga cartoon character , were purchased and licensed by the artists, “shared” with other artists (who did their own projects based upon her), and then ultimately given to the character herself. Other 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 also collaborated with Douglas Gordon to produce the ninety-minute film Zidane: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait (2006). In 2008, Parreno affixed a giant, brightly lit marquee to the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

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), Kunstverein in Munich (2004), and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2009), among other venues. His work has also appeared in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 2003, 2007, and 2009), Lyon Biennale (1997, 2003, and 2005), Let’s Entertain at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2000), Istanbul Bienali (2001), The Big Nothing at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (2004), and theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008). He lives and works in Paris.