INTRODUCTION

This excerpt is taken from the museum brochure accompanying a presentation of the project No Ghost Just a Shell in 2005 at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The brochure, available in the gallery space, reflected the curator of collection's questions evoked by the ownership of No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2002). This seminal project initiated by French-based artists Philippe Parreno (b. 1962) and Pierre Huyghe (b. 1964) was acquired by the Van Abbemuseum on the occasion of the opening of the new museum building in 2003 and consists of about twenty-five artworks by over a dozen artists and artist groups, each work revolving around the fictional character of ‘Annlee’. Before the artworks featuring Annlee were gathered together in one ‘Annlee exhibition’ they already existed as individual artworks. From 1999 onwards the figure of Annlee appeared in many different places, eventually culminating in an exhibition in Zürich (entitled No Ghost Just a Shell) which later travelled to Cambridge and San Francisco. By the time the Van Abbemuseum decided to purchase the whole exhibition, many of the individual Ann-lee-artworks had thus already been showcased in the international art scene: each of the works carrying its own exhibition history.

In the dominant literature, the acquisition of No Ghost Just a Shell is regarded as an endpoint of the project: no more new Annlee-works will be produced and the project has reached its final destination. In this line of thought, the exhibition is understood as a residue, a result of an artistic exploration that has now come to its end, tucked away in a museum building. These writings on No Ghost Just a Shell only consider the initial emergence of the project up until its exhibition, thereby neglecting the formative role of the acquisition and conservation process.