Elmgreen & Dragset on creating a surreal cinema for Prada Mode in London: ‘You are never alone’

In 2018, the Scandinavian artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset – known through their work as Elmgreen & Dragset – transformed London’s Whitechapel Gallery into a derelict swimming bath, its central pool drained of water and dusted with debris as if long abandoned (there was even the faintest scent of chlorine lingering in the air). A comment on the effect of austerity politics on public institutions – particularly in the rapidly gentrified East End of London – such was the power of the illusion that you wondered if it had, in fact, been hidden there all along.

These artistic tricks have been a hallmark of the Berlin-based duo’s work: there has been a life-sized sculpture of a Prada store in the desert of Marfa, Texas; another swimming pool, turned on its end and erected at New York’s Rockefeller Centre; and a lonely art-fair booth in Paris’ Grand Palais, built a month before the opening of that year’s FIAC, as if the pair had got their dates mixed up. Destabilising the everyday, they use these projects to reveal the machinations of power that exist around us, often unnoticed. ‘Sometimes the most profound “truth” can occur in the most banal images,’ the pair told Wallpaper* at the opening of ‘L’Addition’, a 2024 exhibition at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, which saw of series of uncanny figures interspersed among the museum’s permanent collection.

Prada Mode London: ‘The Audience’ by Elmgreen & Dragset

A new work, titled ‘The Audience’, provides the centrepiece of Prada Mode, the Italian fashion house’s roving ‘private members’ club’ that invites artists to create site-specific works and curate a programme of events, talks and lectures (this marks its 13th iteration). The previous edition took place earlier this year in Abu Dhabi, curated by the American artist Theaster Gates, while this latest edition opened for previews yesterday (15 October) in London’s Town Hall, a recently inaugurated cultural space close to King’s Cross in the former Camden Council Town Hall (interiors are by Tom Dixon, while Virginia Damtsa is curating its programme).

Opening to coincide with Frieze Week, the immersive installation sees the Town Hall’s vast main room transformed into a 104-seat cinema, occupied by a series of hyper-realistic human figures posed in ‘various states of attention’ – from an embracing couple to a woman consuming popcorn on the front row (another potent visual trick, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and work out which of the seated figures are real). Their glassy eyes, all rendered from silicone, are fixed on the cinema screen: on it, a distorted film plays on loop, as if watching a scene from a movie through a perpetually blurry lens.

‘When people come into the installation, [we want them to feel] like they’re too late for the cinema,’ the artists explained at a preview yesterday. ‘We all know this feeling, when you are there at the last minute and everyone is seated already, and you need to sneak in and find your seat. [It’s why] we’ve made just one scene, that feels like it's taken out of a bigger movie – you don’t know when it starts and when it ends. No matter when you arrive, you come in in the middle of the movie.’

The film itself depicts an animated conversation between partners – a painter and a writer – who discuss the potential challenges of their respective mediums. And, while their voices can be heard clearly, the visuals are purposefully blurred – the duo liken it to watching a film without glasses, or as if waiting for a video to buffer and load online. ‘We are experiencing image overload through social media, our news feed,’ they say. ‘So instead, we wanted people to see abstract images, just moving against the screen. We used the blur to obscure the visibility of what was going on.’

The choice of a cinema auditorium – which, over the course of the week, will double as a space for a curated series of talks, lectures and screenings – is part of their continuing desire to interrogate the everyday spaces we occupy. ‘We thought it would be interesting to focus on the cinema as a communal space, a place where people gather,’ they say. ‘It is not an algorithm that decides who you are with. You never know who you will be next to.’ (Here, that includes the hyper-realistic figures, who will occupy the cinema’s seats throughout the week, interspersed among the physical attendees.)

‘This whole build-up with the seats, the steps, and the handrails is not normally here, it’s just an open space,’ they say. ‘What we have so often done with our installations is transform spaces – when we do museum shows, we want to give them a different identity than their normal white boxes, [whether] with swimming pools, airport lounges, or private homes. This time, we thought it would be fun to make a movie theatre that would only be here for five days – one where you are never alone.’

Prada Mode is open to the public from 16-19 October 2025.

You can register at Prada’s website.