In Philippe Parreno’s mesmerising and immersive installation My Room is Another Fishbowl (2018), up to one thousand Mylar fish-shaped balloons delicately hover and surround the viewer. Five different species float within a given space, positioned according to atmospheric changes, producing what may be seen as a large architectural fishbowl. These artificial animals become a participatory artwork, gently ascending and descending depending on the touch of the audience, and the amount of heat and light within the space.

An unpredictable narrative unfolds within the room, extending the understanding of artwork beyond just the visual, and into the experiential. In this way, Parreno encourages a deeper reflection on art as a way of measuring one’s sense of time and space. This artwork requires a performance for and by its audience, rather than a passive gaze.

As we walk amongst them, the elegantly suspended, multi-coloured fish balloons invite reflection and contemplation. They engender a dreamlike scenario in which the artwork produces a fictional environment within a real space.

This installation is a quintessential example of Parreno’s recoding of exhibition environments, in which the work of art is determined by the spatial context and by human interaction. With My Room is Another Fishbowl, gallery spaces and vast atria become activated by the relationship between the subject and the artwork. Works such as this consolidate the past two decades of Parreno’s practice, in which the exhibition is continually redefined as a series of events or actions that unfold within a space. In this way, Parreno envisions the exhibition environment itself as an artwork, reinventing preconceived formats of displaying individual objects by instead creating connections between artworks, spaces and the audience.