Elmgreen & Dragset and Jamie Fobert
Chaired by Alice Rawsthorn, Design Critic, International Herald Tribune
Elmgreen and Dragset's close and playful relationship with architecture is underscored by the site-specific environments they often create for exhibitions, particularly their Powerless Structures series of installations. Their work has seen the white cube buried, elevated, and even transformed into a ghostly subway station in a practice that has repeatedly challenged and transgressed the institutional exhibition space, by rendering that space itself as a work of art. For their contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale, the artists will curate both the Nordic and Danish Pavilions, transforming them into domestic spaces with fictional inhabitants; an interest in the idea of the home explored further in their 2008 Trondheim exhibition, Home is the Place You Left.
They will be joined in conversation by Jamie Fobert, an architect whose experience in high-end housing, fashion, and gallery design, from the converted Melnikov bus depot of Dasha Zhukova’s Centre for Contemporary Culture Moscow through to Tate St Ives’ forthcoming extension, will ensure an evening of lively debate on exclusivity, public and private space, and designing and using spaces for art.
Image: Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005. (Adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminium frame, mdf, carpet, prada shoes and bags).
Courtesy the Artists; Art Production Fund, New York; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa. Photo © Lizette Kabré / James Evans.