Somewhere, Anywhere.

In the several times i've been to Paris i had never been inside the Gallerie Lafayette or Printemps department stores, which are both designated heritage properties as well as shops, so i stopped by both of them today to see what i had been missing. And yes i did see some very nice shoes. Here's the big dome in Gallerie Lafayette....

From there i went down to the Palais de Tokyo to check out the Philippe Parreno exhibition. The outside of the Palais had been postered over in some interesting ways....

Palais de Tokyo selfie!

Philippe Parreno is the first artist who has been given use of the entire building, and what he seems to have done is gutted it and and then installed a few player pianos, some video projections, flickering lights, lots of ambient sound, a performance and  what might be a pile of snow. His exhibition is called 'Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World'.

This piano played for abit and then a drum installed above it turned releasing some black material that fell on it.

This bookshelf swiveled out to reveal a hidden room full of drawings of birds.

This is Zidane, a 21st century Portrait, which was actually at the AGH last year. It's an entire soccer match filmed on 17 cameras each focused on a single player, Zidane.

This little girl was delivering a monoloque. I came in at the end so didn't really get the gist of it. Then there was a video about this anime character who looses her identity.

This conveys the stripped back atmosphere of some of the building.... those lights were flickering like crazy to a piano score played in another part of the building.

The pile of snow? salt? The room was quite cold but there was something un-snowish about it. People were happy to make hand shadows on it. There was also another very large room with different marquees of lights that also flashed in syncopation with this piano music.

ooops and now we're jumping across the courtyard to the Musee d'Art Moderne, where in the basement i found this piece by Christian Boltanski. It's all the phone book directories of the world organized as a library, alphabetically by country. So everyone in the world who had a listed phone number in 1993.

I asked the guard if you could consult the books and she said yes so i looked up my honey. 465-4885. Christian Boltanski says so! oh and there's your dad. awww.