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15/9/2005

Elmgreen & Dragset

Bawag Foundation (old location), Wien

The Welfare Show is a traveling exhibition and an ongoing catalogue project by Elmgreen & Dragset. It started at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway in May 2005 and ends at the Power Plant, Toronto in March 2006. It will be presented in the Vienna BAWAG FOUNDATION from 16 September to 26 November 2005. The Welfare Show is not a regular traveling show since it takes different shapes from venue to venue according to the character of the institutional site and its local context.

The Welfare Show is a personal and perverted take on topics related to the current unison reform mode and neo-liberal discourses which can be found throughout a great part of contemporary Western democracies.

For the BAWAG FOUNDATION, Elmgreen & Dragset have created a site-specific installation that diffuses the borders of inside vs outside, marginal vs central, access vs denial. The actual exhibition space is sealed off, but the audience can climb the stairs to what is normally the director’s office, and through binoculars they can witness a performer re-enact a social situation that most of us are only used to be confronted with in mass-mediated imagery. This scene is juxtaposed by real life elements from the actual surroundings – namely the high-end shopping area Tuchlauben – which, similar to the staged situation of poverty, can be observed up close through binoculars located in the foyer area. Targeted interventions in the BAWAG FOUNDATION spaces relate aesthetic and social productions of art to the social surroundings and make them compete with them. Altogether, the installation is reminiscent of a laboratory behavioral experiment, where the spectator for a moment takes the role of the researcher and can make his or her own diagnosis of the situation. Or are we just trapped in an obscure amusement park setup in which we become voyeurs of the social grotesque?

The catalogue has been designed as a kind of “Welfare State Reader” that elucidates different attitudes towards the welfare state, its visions, misunderstandings, its failure, its challenges, and its future feasibility. Which were the political, economic and philosophical ideas behind this phenomenon with the label welfare state, and how did the welfare state develop in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, and Canada? What happened to the welfare state in the globalization process? Authors of the part regarding Austria include Karl Öllinger, Thomas Rothschild, Stephan Schulmeister, Armin Thurnher, and Werner Vogt.

Elmgreen & Dragset have been working on Powerless Structures since the mid-1990s: the project is a continuing series of installations and performances which explore the cultural, social and political functions of public spaces. Questioning the conventional understanding of social spaces in a playful, open and never didactic fashion, the artists comment on the increasingly economic character of social relations – a development experienced as quite problematic.

Since the 1960s, criticizing the “White Cube” has been a popular artistic strategy. Elmgreen & Dragset continue this practice by using their mostly simple spatial interventions to examine the conditions of art spaces as public spaces. Their working method is mainly aimed at changing and substituting the function of rooms, fathoming established structures.

In the Hamburger Bahnhof, the two artists had a gallery space carried by two huge balloons floating in the air. In Milan, they created a real passage from the half-public exhibition space to the private flat above it through a hole in the gallery ceiling. For the São Paulo Biennial of 2002, they presented a concrete prison cell to a scale of one to one. In the Frankfurt Portikus, they positioned a huge wave in the exhibition room which conveyed the impression that the entire room would contract. On other occasions, they decided for more modest interventions, such as that at the Tate Modern, where they showed a realistic sparrow caught behind a window of the museum. Recently, the two artists have converted the lower exhibition area of the Bohen Foundation in New York’s Meat Packing District into a subway station with 30 m long platforms complete with brick walls, benches, rails, trash cans, and a clock that has stopped – some kind of ghost station that never existed but looked as abandoned at some time in the late 1980s.

Michael Elmgreen (born in Denmark in 1961) and Ingar Dragset (born in Norway in 1969) have worked together since 1995 and live in Berlin. Their performances, installations, and space-specific works have found international acclaim. Solo presentations of their works have been shown at the Tate Modern, London, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Kopenhagen, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and the Bohen Foundation, New York. They have participated in numerous group exhibitions such as a show at the MCA in Chicago, the Manifesta 3, and the biennials of Venice, São Paulo, and Berlin.

On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset: The Welfare Show in the BAWAG FOUNDATION at 6.00 p.m. on Thursday, 15 September 2005, Mag. Herbert Tumpel, chairman of the Bundeskammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte, and Thomas Rothschild, lecturer at Stuttgart University, will present the project.

The Welfare Show has been initiated by Bergen Kunsthall, Norway and is produced in collaboration between Bergen Kunsthall, BAWAG FOUNDATION, Vienna, and the Power Plant, Toronto.

Bawag Foundation
1010 Vienna, Tuchlauben 7a
Opening hours Mon – Sat from 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.
closed on Sundays
Guided tours Thursdays at 5.00 p.m. and
Saturdays at 3.00 p.m.
Free admissio

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