Philippe Parreno: Two Automatons for One Duet (My Room Is Another Fish Bowl, 1996–2016, and With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel beyond Existing Forces of Life, 2014)

Gallery 188

Artist Philippe Parreno creates spaces that speculate on alternate worlds or states of being. He conceives his installations not as collections of images or sculptures but as stagelike, a mise-en-scène where a series of events unfold. My Room Is Another Fish Bowl consists of floating helium-filled fish shapes intended to redefine the relationship between subject and object: the experience of museum visitors is both equated and contrasted with that of the fish moving aimlessly within the gallery.

In art and words, Parreno has frequently posed the question: is an exhibition a film without a camera? In this installation, the artist casts museumgoers to move within the gallery space among a specified number of floating objects delicately weighted to hang in the air at various heights. And still, the script is loose, and much is left to chance. The fish move with the gallery’s air currents, visitors enter and depart, and natural light from adjacent windows shifts continually based on time of day and weather conditions. The “film” lasts the length of the exhibition run, and no amount of time spent within the space could produce an identical view.

This exhibition is made possible by the Stuart Family Fund.

Philippe Parreno. My Room Is Another Fish Bowl, 2016. Installation view of IF THIS THEN ELSE, Gladstone Gallery, New York, March 5–April 16, 2016. Centennial Major Acquisitions Income, Alfred and May Tiefenbronner Memorial, Laura T. Magnuson Acquisition, Benjamin Argile Memorial, General Acquisitions Endowment, Maurice D. Galleher Endowment funds; Wirt D. Walker Trust. © Philippe Parreno. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.