Elmgreen & Dragset
Working together since 1995, Norwegian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset) have produced beguiling spatial scenarios that explore social and sexual politics and unveil the power structures embedded in the everyday designs that surround us.
They are best known, perhaps, for their extraordinary 2005 installation, the sculpture Prada Marfa: a replica Prada store installed in the Texan desert. In 2017 the artists curated the 15th Istanbul Biennial. With subversive wit and tongue-in-cheek melancholy, their uncanny installations transform institutional spaces into metaphors for individual desires and collective identities. Through displacement and alteration they challenge the architecture of their exhibition venues, allowing visitors to re-experience domestic and institutional settings. A major new exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset: This Is How We Bite Our Tongue at the Whitechapel Gallery, London – their first in the United Kingdom – juxtaposes a survey of their emotional figurative sculptures with an extraordinary new large-scale installation commissioned especially for the Whitechapel Gallery, which relates to the gentrification of London’s East End and points to
a loss of faith in public space in an era of austerity. The exhibition runs until January 13, 2019.
