Rooms With a View
Berlin-based art stars imagine a life less ordinary By Betty Ann Jordan
An installation from Elmgreen and Dragset's Power Plant show
Art provocateurs Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset made even the most jaded fashionistas sit up in their Bertoia chairs last year with the Prada Marfa project. The hermetically sealed facsimile of a Prada boutique was stocked with the Italian designer’s accessories and left to petrify indefinitely in a west Texas desert. This month, the duo—a fixture on the art biennale circuit—brings its trademark combination of social commentary and extreme theatre to the Power Plant with the Welfare Show. Part of an ongoing series called “Powerless Structures,” which has appeared in dozens of cities worldwide since 1995, it features seven chillingly antiseptic deconstructions of institutional environments. In one, gallery visitors can bend over a mannequin posing as an overflow patient in a simulated fluorescent-bright hospital corridor. In another, a suitcase does laps on a scaled-down model of an airport luggage carousel. In anticipation of their Toronto show, Elmgreen and Dragset have cleverly altered the signage on the Power Plant’s iconic smokestack to read “The Powerless,” suggesting that even the glossiest of public institutions is vulnerable.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Welfare Show runs at the Power Plant from March 25 to May 28. $4. The Power Plant,231 Queens Quay W., 416-973-4949, www.thepowerplant.orgTEST Originally published April 2006
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