Exhibition as cinema, cinema as exhibition: Philippe Parreno and the moving image in the museum

Abstract

This article situates a number of Philippe Parreno’s moving image installations within the developments that led in the 1990s to the establishment of film as one of the pre-eminent forms of display in the museum of contemporary art. From here, a clear yet unexplored relation is established between cinema’s relocation to the museum and artistic practices promoted under the conceptual label of relational aesthetics, with which Parreno was closely associated throughout the 1990s. Conceived as a part of the structural whole comprising an exhibition and embedded in a specific location, film installation was used by Parreno to raise questions concerning the visibility of the artwork and the duration of the viewing encounter. The fluid interactions between temporal and spatial categories in these installations invite a re-examination of the categories of museum and exhibition, as well as the material limits of the medium of the moving image.