Double Vision [VIDEO]

Michael Kurcfeld interviews Elmgreen & Dragset on the occasion of their new exhibition at Pace Gallery Los Angeles.

By Michael KurcfeldOctober 9, 2025

• Art & Architecture

Text by LARB Staff. Video by Michael Kurcfeld.

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FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES, the Berlin-based duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have built a body of work that is equal parts theatrical, biting, and tender—destabilizing the familiar in often cheeky or playful ways. The duo’s practice encompasses sculpture, installation, architecture, and performance, as they train their sights on the institutions, conventions, and ideas that shape everyday life. With deceptively simple gestures—a diving board poking out of a museum window, an ATM installed into a segment of the Berlin Wall—they bring a powerful sense of stagecraft and meticulous, high-polish production to uncanny social critique.

Elmgreen & Dragset are perhaps best known for ambitious site-specific works, such as Prada Marfa (2005), a faux luxury boutique stranded in the Texas desert that has become both pilgrimage site and meme, and Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 (2012) in London’s Trafalgar Square, which replaced the typical martial equestrian monument with a bronze of a boy on a rocking horse—a wry riposte to the language of conquest. The pair have also pursued psychologically charged tableaux that probe themes of alienation, intimacy, queer identity, and the ways that social scripts shape desire and self. Their 2013 exhibition Tomorrow at the Victoria and Albert Museum invited visitors into a fictionalized domestic setting—a faded professor’s apartment, fully furnished, where narrative, memory, and role-play intertwined—and with The Collectors, they invited a dozen artists to help transform the Danish and Nordic pavilions at the 2009 Venice Biennale into haunted scenes of collapsing marriage.

Michael Kurcfeld spoke with the duo inside their current exhibition, The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome at Pace Gallery Los Angeles, discussing their literary inspirations, their latest body of work, and how it relates to the themes and forms that continue to fascinate them. 

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Elmgreen & Dragset: The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is on view at Pace Gallery Los Angeles through October 25,. 2025.