Elmgreen & Dragset

For more than a decade, the artists (Michael Elmgreen born 1961 in Copenhagen, Ingar Dragset born 1969 in Trondheim, Norway, both live and work in Berlin) have been collaborating on a wide range of installations, performances and environmental works. They create sculptures and installations that challenge conventional notions of institutions and public spaces within contemporary society. Since 1997, their Powerless Structuresseries of works has investigated how sites such as prisons, social security offices, hospitals, museums, galleries and parks exercise social control. The works deal with the issue of altering spatial conditions within various fields of the public realm: the urban landscape as well as the art institutional architecture. Architectural and social structures are reorganized in order to investigate the underlying desires of everyday objects and
the mechanisms of ideological control in even the simple arrangements of walls, ceilings, entrances and exits. In the work shown here, the door which is an everyday interior achitectural element that we all relate to in a direct bodily
way, has here become partly “human” itself.