Hans-Ulrich Obrist
Born in Zurich in 1968.
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Hans-Ulrich Obrist is the co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects at the Serpentine Gallery. Prior to this he was curator of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as curator of museum in progress, Vienna. In addition to his work at the Serpentine Gallery, Obrist has curated and co-curated over 200 solo and group exhibitions and biennales, including: World Soup, 1991; do it, 1994; Take Me, I’m Yours, 1995; Manifesta 1, 1996; Laboratorium, 1999; Cities on the Move, 1997; Live/Life, 1996; Nuit Blanche, 1998; 1st Berlin Biennale, 1998; Utopia Station, 2003;
2nd Guangzhou Triennale, 2005; Dakar Biennale, 2004; 1st & 2nd Moscow Biennale, 2005 & 2007; Uncertain States of America and China Power Station, 2006, Lyon Biennale, 2007; Il Tempo del Postino, 2007 & 2009; Yokohama Triennale, 2008; Indian Highway and Everstill, 2008.In 2006, he conceived the Serpentine Gallery Marathon series of annual public events, including the Interview Marathon (2006, conducted with Rem Koolhaas), the Experiment Marathon (2007, conducted with Olafur Eliasson), the Manifesto Marathon (2008) and the Poetry Marathon (2009). In 2007, the Van Alen Institute awarded him the New York Prize Senior Fellowship for 2007–08. In 2009 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Recent publications include A Brief History of Curating, JPP Ringier; The Conversation Series, volumes 1-20, Koenig; and Gerhard Richter Text, Koenig/Thames & Hudson.
Philippe Parreno
Born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria.
Lives and works in Paris.
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Philippe Parreno loosens the coordinates which fix the roles of the artist, the image and the image’s visibility. Through a process of non-authoritarian creation he allows for new narratives to unfold where actual and fictive time and space bifurcate and confront one another. In Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), his feature film made in collaboration with Douglas Gordon, 17 movie cameras placed around a stadium follow Zinedine Zidane throughout one football game. Neither documentary nor fiction, the film causes the real, the image and its commentary to collide and pull apart. Like fireflies, Parreno’s many collaborators, characters and images flicker and fade away in non-linear, episodic eruptions. His large movie theater marquee installed on the facade of the Guggenheim in 2008 twinkles schizophrenically then goes black over and over again. Also on a time loop, his film 1968 (2009) represents the train voyage which carried Robert F. Kennedy’s coffin from New York to Washington, D.C. The chilling images of the past come back to haunt us, appear and disappear ceaslessly. Most recently, Parreno has embarked on a series of retrospectives, each one different, at the Kunsthalle Zurich in May 2009, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in June 2009, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in November 2009, soon at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College, Annadale-on-Hudson, New York in June 2010 and the Serpentine Gallery, London, in November 2010.
