Latest Prada Mode art installation arrives in London next month

Get ready for Prada’s 13th iteration of its Prada Mode event coming to London next month. The Italian fashion house will take over the recently restored landmark Town Hall in King’s Cross in a collaboration with artists Elmgreen & Dragset.

The 15-19 October event, which coincides with Frieze London, sees the multi-day event centre around The Audience, an immersive cinematic-form installation “that is both a sculptural environment and a meditation on spectatorship in the age of image overload, hyperconnectivity, and attention deficit”.

In the space, an intentionally blurred film (written by Elmgreen & Dragset) will be shown in a constant loop. Seemingly a repeating scene from a feature length drama, a painter and a writer discuss their creative practices while in their flat.

In the physical cinema environment, five of the auditorium seats will be occupied by hyperrealistic sculptures of cinemagoers “posed in various states of attention”.

The film’s narrative continues with an additional sculpture, entitled The Conversation. In this work, a female figure sits alone at a café table, FaceTiming with one of the characters from the film. “Shown together, the installations will deliberately obscure the line between viewer and viewed, drawing attention to the act of watching itself”.

According to Elmgreen & Dragset: “The Audience is a work about spectatorship and redirecting the gaze of the visitors. As artists, we have often been interested in making exhibitions where the audience’s attention is pulled in conflicting directions, spaces that would encourage a degree of uncertainty and where the spectator has to actively navigate seemingly familiar environments in new ways.

“Being part of an audience in a cinema or theatre implies being one of many, of sharing an experience, a moment within a spatial choreography. In The Audience, that shared experience becomes visible and the audience becomes part of the narrative itself.”

Prada Mode London will also include talks, conversations, film screenings, performances, and DJ sets “to further explore the idea of spectatorship and open up other modes of thinking about how audiences gather, watch, and respond”.

For the first two days of the event, the space will function as a private members club, followed by three days (17-19 October) open to the public.