White Cubicle Toilet Gallery
Elmgreen & Dragset
A Sculpture Speaks no Evil
Sunday October 17, 2010. 9 to 11 PM
White Cubicle Toilet Gallery is honoured to announce Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo show in the gallery with a live act inside the pub’s toilet. For the duration of two hours 4 men (including both of the artists) will remain bondaged inside of the toilet gallery.
Throughout their career, Elmgreen & Dragset have redefined the way in which art is presented and experienced. Drawing from disciplines as divergent as institutional critique, social politics, performance and architecture, in their sculptures and installations the artists reconfigure the familiar with characteristic wit and subversive humour. From the siting of a Prada boutique in a Texan desert in 2005, to the insertion of institutional spaces within the architecture of a public gallery, as in their Serpentine Gallery's exhibition ‘The Welfare Show’ in 2006, their work raises issues around social models and social spaces, and prompts a re-thinking of the status quo. Their ‘Cruising Pavilion / Powerless Structures, Fig. 55’ from 1998 was an aseptic white container set up as a meeting place for homosexual men in a public park in the Danish town of Århus, its labyrinth structure created individual rooms and glory holes, allowing users to see through or to have sexual contact. In 2003 they won the German Government's competition for a ‘Monument to Homosexuals Persecuted During National Socialism’ in Tiergarten park in Berlin; it was unveiled in May 2008. The monument, a concrete box has a window in it that allows a view of a video projection screened in a loop where one sees two young men in a park immersed in a kiss. For their exhibition ‘Too Late’ in October 2008 they transformed Victoria Miro Gallery into ‘The Mirror’ a gay club that functioned for only a night and when visited felt like “a party that's already over: lights were still blinking and the disco ball was sadly spinning, but there was no-one on the dance floor, and the last round has been served long ago”. That same October they presented ‘Drama Queens’ at The Old Vic Theatre, a stage production featuring six famous sculptures as its protagonists, including Jeff Koons’ Rabbit and Giacometti’s Walking Man. In 2008 Elmgreen & Dragset were awarded both the Danish and Nordic Pavilions for the 2009 Venice Biennale for which they curated ‘The Collectors’ where they transformed the pavilions into domestic environments for fictional inhabitants: a dysfunctional family gone broke, and a rich but lonely homosexual with his collection of objects and the memories of his sex life…
Based in London and Berlin, Michael Elmgreen (Denmark 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Norway 1969) have worked as a collaborative team since the mid 1990s. Major solo exhibitions include MUSAC, León, Spain (2009), Malmö Konsthall (2007), Serpentine Gallery (2006), MCA Chicago (2005), Tate Modern (2004), and Kunsthalle Zurich (2001). They have also participated in Manifesta, The Gwangju Biennial, the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Berlin Biennial, and the Yokohama Triennial. Their upcoming solo show ‘Celebrity. The One & The Many’ at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, opens on November 6 this year. Other upcoming exhibitions in 2011 include The Singapore Biennial, Dublin Contemporary and Performa, New York. Elmgreen & Dragset are currently short listed for the next Fourth Plinth Commission on Trafalgar Square.
THE WHITE CUBICLE TOILET GALLERY measures 1.40 by 1.40 metres, is located within the Ladies Toilet of the George and Dragon, and works with no budget, staff or boundaries. White Cubicle presents a discerning programme of local and international manifestations as an antidote to London’s sometimes extremely commercial art scene. Past exhibitions have included the work of Deborah Castillo, Gregorio Magnani, Butt Magazine, Federico Herrero, Terence Koh, i-Cabin, Steven Gontarski, Pixis Fanzine/Princess Julia and Hanah, General Idea and avaf, Basso Magazin, Carl Hopgood, Giles Round, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Superm, (Brian Kenny and Slava Mogutin), Elkin Calderon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Calvin Holbrook/Hate Magazine, Husam el Odeh, Simon Popper, Fur, Dik Fagazine, Rick Castro/Abravanation, Jean Michel Wicker, Noki, Ellen Cantor, Karl Holmqvist, Julie Verhoeven, Aldo Chaparro, Esther Planas, Nikos Pantazopoulos, Luis Venegas, Twinklife, Rocky Alvarez, Benedetto Chirco, STH-Straight to Hell...
http://www.whitecubicle.org
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