Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset
07 - 31 May 2005
Elmgreen & Dragset
Linienstrasse 160 (Neue Mitte)
This is a show you might miss! A show that you might pass by without even noticing that there is a show going on. It looks much like any other passageway in the neighbourhood with the latest models of designer baby carts stored alongside expensive mountain bikes, shiny letterboxes, a safety gate with a parking `prohibited sign ́ on it, fashionable lighting and a renovation in tasteful discreet colours. This is the Neue Mitte with its invasion of young middle class couples and small trendy lifestyle-based businesses - galleries, fashion and furniture stores, architecture offices, doctor`s offices for cosmetic surgery and organic food shops.
When Elmgreen & Dragset first exhibited at Klosterfelde in 2001, their show took place on the occasion of the inauguration of the gallery‘s new space in Zimmerstrasse. The show consisted of an exact replica of the former (and much smaller) gallery room in Linienstrasse 160 transposed at Klosterfelde‘s new location. Four years later they return to the old space in Linienstrasse and transform the gallery room, which originally was just a passageway into the back courtyard, into a passageway once again – but a passageway which signals the overall gentrification of Berlin Mitte.
The working method of Elmgreen & Dragset, is for a great part based on altering, displacing and questioning space. At Hamburger Bahnhof they let a gallery room hang in the air as if it was elevated by two giant balloons; at the Sao Paulo Biennial 2002 they created a full size broken prison cell made of concrete; at Portikus in Frankfurt they curved the floor and ceiling of the exhibition hall so that it seemed as if the entire room had contracted. On other occasions their spatial intervention is done in a more modest scale, like at the Tate Modern last year where they showed an animatronic and realistic looking sparrow trapped behind a window of the museum which faces the walkway along the Thames, lying on its back struggling for its life.
Recently the artist duo turned the lower level of the exhibition hall of The Bohen Foundation in New York (located in the Meat Packing District) into a subway station with 30 meters long platforms, tiled walls, benches, railway tracks, trash cans and a stopped clock – a kind of a ghost station which never existed but appeared as if it had been abandoned sometime in the late `80s. The installation contained various leftovers from sub-cultural activities and everyday items typical for that decade: Marlboro Man billboards, an old yellowed New York Times depicting the first article on the discovery of HIV, a street poster from the feminist artists group Guerilla Girls, act up stickers and graffiti made by the first generation of New York graffiti artists who were invited to redo some of their old tags.
Elmgreen & Dragset put on display how the control mechanisms of public architecture and urban planning influence our behavioural patterns. In a playful, open and never didactic tone they question the conventions of our domestic settings and investigate how our memory of recent history often gets mixed up and plays us a puzzle, in good part due to the overload of cultural signs and information constantly surrounding us.
For additional information please contact the gallery.
opening May 6th 2005, 6 – 9 pm
duration of the exhibition May 7th – end of May 2005
opening hours Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 – 6pm
Linienstrasse 160 (Neue Mitte)
This is a show you might miss! A show that you might pass by without even noticing that there is a show going on. It looks much like any other passageway in the neighbourhood with the latest models of designer baby carts stored alongside expensive mountain bikes, shiny letterboxes, a safety gate with a parking `prohibited sign ́ on it, fashionable lighting and a renovation in tasteful discreet colours. This is the Neue Mitte with its invasion of young middle class couples and small trendy lifestyle-based businesses - galleries, fashion and furniture stores, architecture offices, doctor`s offices for cosmetic surgery and organic food shops.
When Elmgreen & Dragset first exhibited at Klosterfelde in 2001, their show took place on the occasion of the inauguration of the gallery‘s new space in Zimmerstrasse. The show consisted of an exact replica of the former (and much smaller) gallery room in Linienstrasse 160 transposed at Klosterfelde‘s new location. Four years later they return to the old space in Linienstrasse and transform the gallery room, which originally was just a passageway into the back courtyard, into a passageway once again – but a passageway which signals the overall gentrification of Berlin Mitte.
The working method of Elmgreen & Dragset, is for a great part based on altering, displacing and questioning space. At Hamburger Bahnhof they let a gallery room hang in the air as if it was elevated by two giant balloons; at the Sao Paulo Biennial 2002 they created a full size broken prison cell made of concrete; at Portikus in Frankfurt they curved the floor and ceiling of the exhibition hall so that it seemed as if the entire room had contracted. On other occasions their spatial intervention is done in a more modest scale, like at the Tate Modern last year where they showed an animatronic and realistic looking sparrow trapped behind a window of the museum which faces the walkway along the Thames, lying on its back struggling for its life.
Recently the artist duo turned the lower level of the exhibition hall of The Bohen Foundation in New York (located in the Meat Packing District) into a subway station with 30 meters long platforms, tiled walls, benches, railway tracks, trash cans and a stopped clock – a kind of a ghost station which never existed but appeared as if it had been abandoned sometime in the late `80s. The installation contained various leftovers from sub-cultural activities and everyday items typical for that decade: Marlboro Man billboards, an old yellowed New York Times depicting the first article on the discovery of HIV, a street poster from the feminist artists group Guerilla Girls, act up stickers and graffiti made by the first generation of New York graffiti artists who were invited to redo some of their old tags.
Elmgreen & Dragset put on display how the control mechanisms of public architecture and urban planning influence our behavioural patterns. In a playful, open and never didactic tone they question the conventions of our domestic settings and investigate how our memory of recent history often gets mixed up and plays us a puzzle, in good part due to the overload of cultural signs and information constantly surrounding us.
For additional information please contact the gallery.
opening May 6th 2005, 6 – 9 pm
duration of the exhibition May 7th – end of May 2005
opening hours Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 – 6pm