My Room is Another Fish Bowl

Philippe Parreno creates spaces that allow us to speculate about alternate worlds and states of being. My Room Is Another Fish Bowl is an immersive installation which explores how objects and environmental factors left to chance actively shape human behavior and the perception of the passage of time. The work consists of helium-filled fish shapes that have been delicately weighted to float at different heights. Circulating around these floating objects, the visitors have an experience that may be equated or contrasted with that of the fish moving aimlessly within the gallery. In art and words, Parreno has frequently proposed the exhibition as a film without a camera. Here he casts museumgoers to move in a carefully staged gallery space. The fish move with the gallery’s air currents, visitors enter and exit, and natural light from adjacent windows shifts continually according to the weather and time of day. No two individuals’ experience of the space will be identical, nor will the ever-changing installation configuration repeat itself. The drifting Mylar forms and the museum visitors act upon and define each other, rendering both groups neither purely social nor wholly natural.