The Speaker, 2020

Philippe Parreno’s The Speaker consists of 15 ultra-directional speakers mounted as a grid on a moving arm that can rotate on all its axes. Produced on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at Esther Schipper, The Speaker was conceived as the central point of the exhibition, channeling the sounds produced by all the works in the exhibition space, thus becoming the recipient of the exhibition’s soundtrack.

Sound has always been a major component of Parreno’s projects. However, the artist doesn’t use speakers as mere exhibition devices to broadcast sound in the space: instead, he turns the object into an integral part of his exhibitions. From his Hyundai commission at Tate Modern in 2016, where dozens of speakers hanging from the Turbine Hall ceiling were moving up and down according to a script conceived by Parreno, to Echo—his 2019 commission at MoMA where the artist introduced a rotating speaker for the first time—speakers have played a major part in the artist’s work.