A life-size "game" at Pompidou-Metz

About the "Bonne chance" exhibition by Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz until 1 April 2024.

The impertinent Berlin-based artistic duo of Michael Elmgreen (Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (Norway) are renowned for their disconcerting installations and their art of irreverence, which they have developed on the fringes of traditional contemporary art circuits. The proof is in the form of 'Bonne Chance', Elmgreen & Dragset's first solo exhibition in a French institution, curated by Chiara Parisi, on show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz until 1 April 2024. The programme includes a radical transformation of the Grande Nef, the Forum and the roofs of the Galeries into several artificial, global environments. This is the first time that the Moselle art centre dedicated to modern and contemporary art has devoted the immense space of the Grande Nef, often singled out for the energy drain it represents, to a solo exhibition.

Bonne chance" is obviously an ironic title. Because nobody here is lucky! "Not even the spectator, whom the artists push through a labyrinthine exhibition, under the prying eye of surveillance cameras whose images are broadcast towards the end of the tour, in what looks like a control room", warns Judicaël Lavrador in his article for this summer's issue of Beaux Arts Magazine. "Clearly, the visitor is one of the protagonists of the show. They are exposed to the gaze of others. This is one of the creeds of Elmgreen & Dragset's art, which plays to the full on the mirror effect. The precarious condition of their characters sends the viewer back to their own and to the most sordid aspects of contemporary society. Given the works of art on show in Metz, "simple and clear-cut, never very complicated to understand" according to the journalist, effective as "plastic punchlines", it's easy to understand why the Berlin studio of the Scandinavian duo, who have been attacking institutions of all kinds for nearly thirty years, including in the world of contemporary art, measures 13 m under the ceiling!

Since collaborating in 1995, Elmgreen & Dragset have redefined the 'exhibition format' by designing temporary architectures and life-size models of public and private spaces. Rather than seeing their artworks as a collection of static objects in a neutral space, the artists, now represented by the art galleries Emmanuel Perrotin, Pace and Massimo de Carlo, see each individual work as a segment of a larger story, reborn each time it is exhibited in a different context. In this way, the duo bring together existing and new sculptures in a site-specific constellation, initiating new narratives. Often realistic, these installations will reproduce common urban environments that most of us encounter regularly in our daily lives, but rarely in a museum context. Here and there, in these desolate environments, highly realistic silicone figures carry out various activities...

For example, The Outsiders, a work of art in the shape of a Mercedes estate car, is 'parked' next to a life-size sculpture in the shape of a building in the Forum de Pompidou-Metz, which alters the usual experience of architecture by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. The car is full of packed paintings, and two hyper-realistic human sculptures seem to be desperately trying to fall asleep in it. "This is what happens to artists' assistants in Basel at the time of the fair," explains Elmgreen. "Because they're always turned away from openings and the hotels are too expensive...". It's a life that both artists know well.

"When they met in Copenhagen in the mid-1990s, one of them, Michael Elmgreen, born in Denmark in 1961, was writing poetry; the other, Ingar Dragset, eight years his junior from Norway, was embarking on an acting career in experimental theatre. Both of them had to admit that being avant-garde in Scandinavia wouldn't offer them much chance of making it," writes Judicaël Lavrador. "So they left for Berlin, a capital with cheap studios and unexpected artistic opportunities, even for self-taught artists of their calibre. One of them was the inevitable contemporary art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, who immediately after meeting them invited them to his "Nuit blanche" exhibition, a panorama of Scandinavian art, at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1998. From then on, buoyed by a context in which contemporary art galleries and public institutions were daring to produce installations on a more or less large scale, Elmgreen & Dragset established their style: proposals that played on the exhibition space and confronted the viewer with environments full of narrative beginnings.

As they wander around the Centre Pompidou-Metz, visitors are invited to gather clues and imagine what might have happened or is about to happen. In this way, the public themselves become players, like detectives, uninvited guests or intruders. In addition to the installations in the galleries, there are occasional performances at weekends, as there will be in October. With the pathos and subversive humour that characterise the artists, 'Bonne Chance' presents a world that is both familiar and disturbing, where the ordinary is reinvented to become extraordinary. From the very start of the exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset disrupt our spatial and temporal reference points in a most disconcerting experience.

The artists believe that every space, like 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', has a hidden alter ego that they hope to reveal by modifying or displacing it. The One & the Many is an East German social housing building, a "plattenbau", like many others in Berlin. Visitors can only see the flats from the outside, as all the windows are covered by blinds or curtains. If they try to ring the doorbell, no one will answer. In the Grande Nef, the boundary between fiction and reality becomes even more blurred. Here, Elmgreen & Dragset arrange the elements as in a video game where the player has to navigate a labyrinthine space, never knowing what the next turn holds. The exhibition is studded with scenes from everyday life, including a theatre, a public toilet, a laboratory, a conference room, a morgue, a surveillance room and a deserted office. As if in a dream (or a nightmare?), ordinary situations follow an incoherent logic where the rules no longer apply. With an almost unsettling familiarity, these situations engender a sense of discomfort and unease. The strangeness intensifies as the viewer encounters zany characters, such as a young man asleep on the conference room table, dressed in a rabbit costume, or a tightrope walker who has slipped and is hanging on to his wire with one hand.

As Judicaël Lavrador writes, "Elmgreen & Dragset stir up desire and frustration, as embodied by this solitary adolescent mannequin, sitting on the edge of the void, hooded, melancholic, who, you think, might as well be ready to jump". Spectators and silicone characters alike find themselves in Kafkaesque situations, with the impossibility of getting a grip, of crossing the limits imposed. Yet the artists insist that "these structures, unlike those in a video game, can always be changed or interchanged. In a society, as long as we accept the structures that support power, power remains as it is".