LONDON.- This autumn the Serpentine Gallery presents Philippe Parreno’s first solo exhibition in a public institution in the UK. Parreno rose to prominence in the 1990s, earning critical acclaim for his work, which employs a diversity of media including film, sculpture, performance and text. Taking the exhibition as a medium, Parreno has sought to redefine the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities beyond a collection of individual works.

Parreno’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery has been conceived as a scripted space in which a series of events unfolds. The visitor is guided through the Galleries by a timeline of orchestrated sound and image. Noise from Kensington Gardens is heard inside, as though the outside is leaking into the Gallery. The window blinds move automatically to reveal sudden change of weather.

The show features the UK premiere of Parreno’s latest film, Invisibleboy (2010), the story of an illegal Chinese immigrant boy who sees imaginary monsters, which are scratched onto the film stock. Fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap within the film’s shots. Also included in the exhibition, June 8, 1968 (2009) recalls the train voyage that transported the corpse of assassinated senator Robert Kennedy from New York to Washington D.C. Kennedy’s body and the Invisibleboy are characters that float between several layers of reality.

The Serpentine exhibition follows a series of related but distinct retrospectives of the artist’s work presented at Kunsthalle Zürich, 2009; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2009-2010; and the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 2010.

Philippe Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria and lives and works in Paris. Other major exhibitions of the artist’s work include: Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu, Japan, 2006; Kunsthalle Zürich, 2006; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2003; Musée d’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris, 2002, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2001.