SYDNEY.- This summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) will come alive as celebrated French artist Philippe Parreno reveals his first major exhibition in Australia. Philippe Parreno: 5 Moons will see Parreno take over and transform the MCA Australia into a dynamic, spontaneous production filled with sound, light, movement and unexpected encounters.
Philippe Parreno (b. 1964, France) is a pivotal figure at the forefront of contemporary art. Threading together film, audio, installation, objects, text, drawing and advanced technologies including AI and robotics, he is renowned for radically reimagining the very essence of what an exhibition is. He describes himself not as an artist, but as an ‘exhibition producer’ – orchestrating environments that think, respond and unfold over time and place.
Parreno's exhibitions explore the boundaries between reality, fiction and hypothesis, immersing visitors in temporal and sensory experiences that shift and flow. He transforms galleries and buildings into scripted spaces where events play out in exciting, unpredictable sequences. Through extensive collaborations with fellow artists, architects and musicians, he challenges traditional notions of authorship, producing multi-layered works in constant movement that resist reduction to a single form or medium.
Drawing on the poetic metaphor of the moon as signal, cycle and unseen influence, this exhibition will explore how the MCA Australia – and its iconic Warrane/Sydney Harbour location – waxes and wanes over five lunar cycles.
Attuned to both algorithmic logic and the terrestrial rhythms of sun, moon, tide and sky of the surrounding landscape, Parreno's choreographed architectures will generate living, interconnected experiences where art and ideas materialize and dissolve, ascend and descend in perpetual circulation.
Parreno will activate the MCA Australia across multiple floors – including the International Galleries, Macgregor Gallery, Lecture Theatre, and unexpected pockets of the building – to create a shifting sensory journey filled with atmospheric changes and playful disruption.
Visitors will enter a world shaped by fluctuating atmospheres, immersive environments and surprising interventions that challenge familiar ideas of what an exhibition can be – and never the same twice.
Suzanne Cotter, Director, MCA Australia and Exhibition Curator said: ‘Philippe Parreno doesn’t simply present artworks; he transforms the exhibition format into a living environment of cinematic, sensory and poetic encounter. We are thrilled to bring this remarkable artist and his vision to Sydney for the Sydney International Art Series.’
Parreno’s ambitious, large‑scale projects have left a lasting mark on contemporary art and have profoundly shaped thinking around exhibition-making. Highlights include his monumental transformation of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (London, 2016), the acclaimed Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2013), and major exhibitions at Haus der Kunst (Munich) and Leeum Museum of Art (Seoul) across 2024–25. In 2021, LUMA Arles Foundation opened a permanent gallery designed by Frank Gehry, dedicated to the work of Parreno. In 2025, as Artistic Director, he reimagined the entire city of Okayama, Japan, as a responsive open‑air artwork with The Parks of Aomame – one of his most audacious projects to date
Parreno's 2006 feature film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait co-directed with artist Douglas Gordon premiered at the 66th Cannes Film Festival. In 2022, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, showed Quinta del Sordo, Parreno’s film of Francisco Goya’s legendary Black Paintings (Pinturas Negras), in a major international co-commission with Fondation Beyeler. He is currently working on his next feature film starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vicky Krieps and Zoe Saldana.
