Philippe Parreno's dreams haunted by elusive visions

Philippe Parreno is difficult to define, so stylistically and materially diverse is his work. But his medium is essentially the exhibition itself — he exploits the conventions of our gallery visits to orchestrate complex and deeply involving experiences, and his Serpentine Gallery show is a masterly example.

Parreno shows four films, through which he creates a precise looping journey. At the end of one film, the blinds fall in the adjacent gallery for the start of another; when that one finishes, the song which closes it shifts to speakers in the neighbouring space, drawing us to the next work.

The films are distinct in tone and content but the title of the earliest, No More Reality (1991), is an apt motto for the show. Parreno blurs fact and fiction, lending the exhibition a dreamlike elusiveness.

Invisibleboy (2010) features a five-year-old Chinese illegal immigrant apparently alone inside a cluttered New York apartment. Both the flat and the city become haunted by figures of the boy’s imagination — rabbits playing dice in a café, a bear underneath the sink — which are scratched into the film stock.

In June 8, 1968 (2008) Parreno pays homage to Paul Fusco’s photographs of people watching the train carrying Bobby Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington after his assassination. Parreno does not reconstruct Fusco’s pictures so much as evoke — with great beauty — the landscapes, people and period details like cars and road signs in that series. But although Parreno supplants Fusco’s stills with moving images, his mourners seem eerily frozen in time.

The half-hour film sequence is so enigmatic and deeply absorbing that it repays more than one viewing. But Parreno’s loop is one in which I was thrilled to be caught.

Until Feb 13 (020 7402 6075, serpentinegallery.org)

Philippe Parreno
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens, W2 3XA