The Trial of Pol Pot
8 November 1998 - 3 January 1999
A project co-ordinated by Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno
supervised by Douglas Gordon, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Pierre Joseph, Josephine Pryde, Gabriel Kuri, Jeremy Millar, Thomas Mulcaire, Adrian Schiesser, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Zeigam Azizov, Terry Atkinson...

Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno have been invited by Le MAGASIN - Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble to propose a research project and exhibition.

"The Trial of Pol Pot" introduces a new exhibition structure by constructing a series of frameworks which associates successively a number of partners in order to examine the notion of collapsed twentieth century concepts of power and utopia through extreme moral and ideological belief systems. The project deals with the question of rogue identity in light of film and media representations.

Project development

An initial discussion document was written by Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno and circulated to a small group of persons, mainly artists, who made comments on the text, proposed revisions and suggestions, acting as a supervision group. After considering all comments, Gillick and Parreno decided that it would not be useful to propose a standard group exhibition structure, but rather to change the hierarchical order of the proposal.

Subsequently Gillick and Parreno contacted ten people involved in research working in parallel to the concerns of the artists: philosophy, genetic research, urban studies, sociology, economic development and so on. The group of ten reviewed the discussion document and proposed a series of questions.

The questions are taken as material to be laid out by Gillick and Parreno in order to treat the space of Le MAGASIN as a large location for a graphic over-haul and an overdose of enquiry.

The layouts proposed by the artists and edited by the committee occupy most of the walls of Le MAGASIN. Using laser-cut lettering and graphic devices, a direct transfer is made from the computer screen to the walls of the space.

The largest space of Le MAGASIN, "la Rue", is occupied by a giant picture.

Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno have in common the fact that they cannot be reduced to a single medium, to a single artistic form. They multiply the means and modes of intervention in projects developed within the framework of possible stories. These are rather film narrations for Parreno, rather literary ones for Gillick.
Every approach of their work implies the entry of the spectator into a fictional story. In Liam Gillick's case the author is most often absent (in his first artistic work at the beginning of the eighties he acted as a reporter). Instead Philippe Parreno sometimes is one of the constituants of his fictional stories (his own image is represented in several of his works).

BIOGRAPHY
Liam Gillick was born in 1964. He lives and works in London and New York.
Philippe Parreno was born 1964. He lives and works in Paris.