This collaborative group of works uses the copyright for a manga character, Ann Lee, attempting to free her from her status as a product and question the nature of images and identity.

The title refers to Masamune Shirow’s manga classic, Ghost in the Shell, which explores the possibilities of infiltrating human minds and hijacking identity. French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the copyright to Ann Lee’s image from the Japanese agency Kworks in 1999. They subsequently commissioned other artists to appropriate the character and propose scenarios in which Ann Lee is liberated from ownership and can resolve the ambiguities of her fate. She is displaced from her original function as a minor figure in a cartoon and enters a virtual space where her rights to an identity and existence are constantly explored.

Ann Lee is effectively suspended between contexts: she is both ‘out of the world’ and ‘out of time’. Her identity is not fixed as a representation or as a literary device. She is instead an image that represents only itself, what Huyghe describes as a ‘deviant sign’. Though released from her role of bit-part manga character, Ann Lee remains a commodity in the hands of her many authors. She is a vessel or tool for the performance of various narratives. At the end of the project, the artists signed Ann Lee’s copyright over to the character herself, thereby giving her autonomy but simultaneously relegating her to silence.

Pierre Huyghe was born in 1962 in Paris, France. Philippe Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria. Both live and work in Paris.

This display features work generously donated by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz to Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

Curated by Stuart Comer and Rachel Taylor with assistance from Gil Leung