“My name is Annlee […] I am an imaginary character. I am no ghost, just a shell.”
No Ghost Just a Shell is a project that was co-conceived by artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. In 1999, the two acquired the rights to an undisclosed background character inexpensively from a Japanese manga design agency. They named the imaginary character, Annlee, and began to fill her life stories. For the next three years, about 20 artists participated in this project, giving birth to over 30 multimedia works in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, posters, books, and music. These works came to be put together in the exhibition titled No Ghost Just a Shell in 2002. It is both a collection of individual works, and a multiauthor project around a single character. The title originated from Ghost in the Shell, the 1995 Japanese animation that raises a question as to whether there is human consciousness, soul, or ghost, in the cyborg, i.e., inside the shell of a cybernetic body.
Afterwards Huyghe and Parreno transferred her copyright to the character itself by founding an association in her name; and in December 2002, they decided to liberate Annlee from the realm of representation and staged a display of fireworks above Miami Beach in Art Basel, through which they declared Annlee vanished for good. Annlee was emancipated and sentenced to death at once, but No Ghost Just a Shell in its entirety became a collection of Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This acquisition was ground-breaking in terms of revisiting the relationships of ideas, mediums, forms and rights in art. 20 years or so after its inception, the historic project has now grown all the more in importance in 2024. This exhibition made up of the works from Van Abbemuseum will present interesting but critical perspectives on today’s postdigital era where technological environments like generative Artificial Intelligence are significantly changing the ways art is produced, and are prompting digital images that exist as data to evolve on their own as subjects having emotions, personality, and identity.
* Richard Philips, Annlee, 2002, oil on canvas, 198.6×249.6×3.9cm. Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
