ELMGREEN AND DRAGSET 'A SCULPTURE SPEAKS NO EVIL', LIVE ACT AT WHITE CUBICLE TOILET GALLERY

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

INGAR DRAGSET'S 40TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

the old pumping station - Elmgreen and Dragset's studio


afternoon barbecue


Henrik Olesen and Karl Holmqvist, Heike and David in the background


Henrik Olesen, Danh Vo, Michael Elmgreen


caramel wrapping



fluorescent high heels and duck!


The polizei arrives demanding for the party to end




Polizei happens to be a stripper-birthday gift!!!





happy ending!

BERLIN, SUNDAY VISIT TO THE 'NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR THE HOMOSEXUAL VICTIMS OF THE NAZI REGIME'

National Memorial for the Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Regime

In 2003, the German Reichstag (parliament) voted in favor of commissioning a monument to commemorate the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime. Following an international competition in 2006, Berlin-based artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset's proposal was selected for realization.

Elmgreen & Dragset have related the aesthetics of the monument to the Holocaust memorial, which is located directly opposite, on the other side of the street. While Peter Eisenmann’s Holocaust memorial consists of 2711 concrete stelae (cubic slabs), Elmgreen & Dragset have opted for just one single slab, using the same material, color and proportions as Eisenmann's, but enlarging it slightly in its overall size to take on the character of a pavilion. Whilst the concrete 'pavilion' lacks any exits or entrances, the visitor will - through a small, square window - be able to watch an endless film loop of two men embracing in a kiss.

The appropriation of elements borrowed from the Holocaust memorial underlines the similarities in experience of persecution and suffering between the different victim groups, whereas the intimacy of the film loop insists on an identity of its own. Situated on the other side of the street, the work seems to say: 'We are the same, but we are also different.'

The film is shot by cinematographer Robby Müller (Down by Law; Paris, Texas; Dancer in the Dark; Coffee and Cigarettes) and directed by the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (who’s film Festen (Celebration) won the Jury Prize in Cannes, 1998). The kissing scene is shot on 35mm black and white film at the actual location of the memorial before it was erected. Watching the film through the window, one may recognize that the background to the two kissing men is identical to the backdrop of the pavilion itself, with one subtle difference: the change of seasons that will indicate the passage of time.

The memorial seeks in various ways to exchange the monumental with the intimate, aiming to confront the public on a personal level rather than constitute a general spectacle. The tiny window carved out into the concrete block allows only a couple of people to experience the film clip at one time.The viewers will find themselves face to face with the poetic, emotional moment of the two men kissing. The clarity of the scene and the direct depiction that the viewer is met with is crucial to an understanding of the memorial. The acceptance of other sexual orientations is not only a question of obtaining legal rights but also one of acceptance on the street level and in everyday situations.

Every second year for a period of ten years the film clip will be exchanged with other artists’ filmic interpretations of a homosexual intimate encounter. Through this regenerative element, Elmgreen & Dragset's memorial will renew its character over and over again and provide material for ongoing discussions on identity and representational issues.

PABLO'S SELECTION, 53 VENICE BIENNALE, 2009

Andre Cadere's 'Barre des Bois Ronds' 1970-1978
Anonymous, bottle of sparking water in the exhibition space, 2009


Atsuko Tanaka's, pink cloth and fan, 1955



Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster 'De Novo' film



Gordon Matta Clark's 'Tree Dance' film, 1973-1974





Wolfgang Tillmans' photographs and tables


Rirkrit Tiravanija's Bookshop


Tobias Rehberger's cafeteria


Aleksandra Mir's Venice postcards



Bruce Nauman's USA pavillion






Elmgreen and Dragset's death homosexual collector's house at the Nordic pavilion


Henrik Olesen's Cubes (after Sol LeWitt) at Elmgreen and Dragset's gay pavillion




Liam Gillick kitchen cupboards and cat at the German pavilion




Haegue Yang's venetian blinds in the Korean pavilion



Teresa Margolle's blood from the assesinated ones at the Mexican Pavillion


Lygia Pape's golden threads


Yonna Friedman and Marjetica Potrc


Yona Friedman's ceiling


Marjetica Potrc's drawings




Cildo Meireles coloured labyrinth





Ulla von Brandenburg coloured labyrinth



Tirdad Zolghadr's United Arab Emirates pavilion


Hassan Sharif's 1979 walk at the United Arab Emirates pavilion


Ghery's Guggenheim and Nouvel's Louvre at the United Arab Emirates pavilion


Catherine David's 'Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage Platform'


Federico Herrero's remain of mural done in the 2001 biennale with which he won the golden lion for best young artist, the space now converted into a cafeteria!


Lara Favaretto's swamp