Elmgreen/Dragset

Biography Elmgreen/Dragset (Denmark/Norway, collaborating since 1995)
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been working together since 1995. Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961 in Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969 in Norway) live and work in Berlin.

In 1995 Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset began their collaboration on what has since become a wide range of installations, performances and environmental works.
In a series of projects entitled “Powerless Structures” the artist duo challenges the conventional perception of space: 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. The works from this series 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. The projects often provide a possibility of actual change: a change of social structures in smaller scale; alterations of Modernistic design or projects which accentuate the options for alternative ways of presenting art within the museum or gallery. The emphasis is put on the deconstruc-tion and reconstruction of meaning in predetermined or institutionalised spaces.
Selected solo exhibibion are in 2008 Too Late, Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Drama Queens, Old Vic Theatre, London; Home is the Place You Left, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim; Inauguration of Gedenkort für die im Nazionalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen, Berlin; Side Effects, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. In 2004, Intervention 37, Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Blocking the View, Tate Modern, London; Moving Energies, Museum Folkwang, Essen.

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