The Collective Eye

Every artist who claims to do everything alone is lying. Michael Elmgreen (born 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark, lives and works in Berlin) and Ingar Dragset (born 1969 in Trondheim, Norway, lives and works there) have been creating provocative yet humorous installations at the intersection of art, design, and architecture as a duo since 1995. In their expansive installations, such as the sculptures exhibited and collected at the 53rd Venice Biennale and internationally, they explore questions of identity and belonging. A key part of their artistic toolkit is radical recontextualization: by transferring spaces into different functional contexts or through architectural interventions, they transcend and reinterpret the old attributions of a place. Some of their most well-known works include Prada Marfa (2005), a life-sized replica of a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texas desert; Short Cut (2003), a car and a caravan that break through the floor of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan; and Van Gogh's Ear (2016), a nearly 10-meter-high pool set up in front of the Rockefeller Center in New York. In a conversation with The Collective Eye, Elmgreen & Dragset discuss the romantic elevation of artistic creation, advocate for an honest commitment from artists to collaborative work, and question the myth of the artist-genius. Elmgreen & Dragset reveal their own working process and provide insight into their creations over the last two decades in collaboration with their studio – affectionately referred to as "family members." About The Collective Eye: The Collective Eye (TCE) is a project collective with changing members. Through interviews, symposiums, exhibitions, and discussion volumes, it aims to strengthen a multinational dialogue between collectives and theorists in the exploration of collective creativity.