France – Metz
A dummy Prada boutique set up in the middle of the Texas desert in 2005, a drowned collector floating in a pool at the Venice Biennale in 2009, a contemporary art centre transformed into a fictitious art fair in Beijing in 2016, a swimming pool in the shape of a giant ear erected vertically at New York’s Rockfeller Center in the same year, a car embedded in the middle of Milan’s Galerie Vittorio Emmanuele II, an upside-down city of miniature buildings hanging from the ceiling of Moynihan Train Hall in the heart of Manhattan in 2021… Elmgreen & Dragset’s installations and immersive environments have left their mark on the contemporary art world over the past twenty decades.
Invited to take over the nave, forum and roof galleries of the Centre Pompidou Metz, the Scandinavian duo Michael Elmgreen (Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (Norway) return in force to destabilise us. Reproducing urban environments populated by highly realistic silicone characters, absorbed in various activities, like protagonists in stories to be imagined, they always manage to turn them into desolate environments… This is because their universe, tinged with irony and flippancy, willingly impertinent and burlesque, bordering on the absurd and even, at times, surrealism, is also deeply melancholy. And often macabre. For example, their pensive teenagers locked on balconies hanging in the void, a door opening onto a corpse in the middle of a morgue’s alignments of metal compartments, face-to-face bunk beds or washbasins attached by their pipes… Whether bizarre or morbid, these installations are designed to disrupt the social and spatial references anchored in our collective unconscious. “…] It is possible to change […] perceptions, aesthetic conventions – by surprising people,” Elmgreen asserted in Artspace in 2020.
OBSTRUCTIONS AND DESTABILISATION
Right from the start of the exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset disrupt our spatiotemporal reference points by blurring the boundaries between indoors and outdoors, erecting a life-size council flat in the heart of the museum’s forum. In the Grande Nef, “the boundary between fictional and real becomes even more blurred”: prey to a labyrinthine space peppering scene of everyday life, from a theatre to a public toilet, via a laboratory, a conference room, a morgue, a surveillance room and a disused office, visitors discover, “a world both familiar and disquieting, where the ordinary is reinvented to become extraordinary”. “As in a dream (or nightmare?), ordinary situations follow an incoherent logic where rules no longer apply. In an almost unsettling familiarity, these situations engender a sense of discomfort and unease. The strangeness intensifies as the viewer encounters zany characters, such as a young man asleep on the conference room table, dressed in a bunny suit, or a tightrope walker who has slipped and is clinging to his wire with one hand.” 1 [So many “fictionalised realities” and incongruous situations that can evoke the surprises and pitfalls of “a video game on a human scale “2. Hence the title of the exhibition: “Good luck”… ]
- Chiara Parisi, exhibition curator, catalogue excerpt.
- Elmgreen & Dragset, an excerpt from the conversation with Chiara Parisi published in the exhibition catalogue.
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET – GOOD LUCK
Until April 1, 2024
Centre Pompidou Metz
1, parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme, 57000 Metz
https://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/fr/programmation/exposition/elmgreen-dragset
COMING SOON
Elmgreen & Dragset Exhibition at Galerie Perotin
October 14th to November 18th
perrotin.com