Working together since 1995, artist duo Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Norway) produce beguiling spatial scenarios that explore social and sexual politics and unveil the power structures embedded in the everyday designs that surround us. In their uncanny installations, institutional spaces are transformed into metaphors for individual desires and collective identities with subversive wit and tongue-in-cheek melancholy.
This exhibition juxtaposes a survey of their emotional figurative sculptures with an extraordinary new large-scale installation that meditates on the fate of civic space.
For their survey exhibition This Is How We Bite Our Tongue the artists have transformed the ground floor of the gallery into an abandoned swimming pool, a deserted space relating to the gentrification of London’s East End. The work is accompanied by a fictional narrative charting both the pool’s rise as a public amenity and its politically sanctioned and commercially driven decline.
Elmgreen & Dragset: This Is How We Bite Our Tongue. Whitechapel Gallery, London, 27 September 2018 – 13 January 2019
