CONCEPTUAL art’s many naysayers might be dipping their quills into the poison ink for this one, but they would be wrong: the French artist Pierre Huyghe has designed a transfixing wonderland at Tate Modern. The visitor is welcomed by a neon sign that reads: “I Do Not Own Tate Modern Or The Death Star.” There’s a video of a girl’s face superimposed over a fireworks display. Then, in a huge second room a pair of floor-to-ceiling white doors, “gates”, waltz open and shut around the space.

Watch out, they’re nippy.

Huyghe’s “celebration park”, filled with a cacophony of music and clanking, isn’t meant to be a funfair. The “gates” are gateways between worlds.

Huyghe is obsessed by fiction, reality and myth-making, so the girl’s face and the fireworks reference the moment in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when the Cheshire cat disappears, leaving only its floating grin. The neons (“I Do Not Own 4’33”, “I Do Not Own Modern Times”) aren’t opaque slogans, but comments on who owns popular culture. On a video Lucie Dolène, the French voiceover artist who played Snow White in the 1937 Disney film, talks about how Disney reused her performance without her permission.

Huyghe is exercised by authority and ownership. In 2004 he accepted an invitation from Harvard to “respond” to the campus’s Carpenter visual arts centre, designed by Le Corbusier. Both men had fraught experiences with the institution, which Huyghe represents through a puppet show, with Harvard portrayed as a nightmarish mix of crow and Darth Vader, which he then staged at Harvard. The video of the show — like all Huyghe’s astonishing films — demands more than just casual attention.

Another video, equally multi-layered, shows a voyage to Antarctica, where Huyghe intended to name an uncharted island. Film of this bizarre trip plays alongside footage of a performance by an orchestra (at the Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park) in which Huyghe intended to evoke the topography of the island through music. The island is also represented in model form with an animatronic albino penguin.

A final video follows new residents celebrating the birth of their village in New York State. Burgers grill on barbecues and people pick marshmallows off sticks, but the landscape is desolate and scarred. For Huyghe “celebration” doesn’t mean happy, but performance, ritual and the passing of time. Posters from Huyghe’s many collaborators inaugurate proposed days of public celebration — Tacita Dean’s “day of obsolescence” would “celebrate things on the verge of disappearing from use in our society” and “the wisdom of allowing them to be lost”.

Huyghe may not intend it but this is ultimately a fairground, though of reinvention and subversion rather than candyfloss and dodgems. You should go along for the ride.

At Tate Modern from today to September 17, 020-7887 8888