Frieze week is, without doubt, a highlight of London’s cultural calendar – a chance to celebrate the city’s world-beating arts and culture scene. The main event, of course, takes place in Regent’s Park in the form of the two titanic art fairs that take up residence annually: Frieze London and Frieze Masters. This year, though, there’s another blockbuster addition to the schedule: Prada Mode, the roving cultural salon and events programme staged by the infamously art-world-adjacent Milanese fashion house.
Now in its 13th iteration, having staged activations across the world, this marks the second time that Prada Mode has touched down in London (it was last here during the 2019 edition of Frieze). For 2025, however, the scale is more ambitious, with Prada Mode taking over the newly renovated Town Hall in King’s Cross for a week-long programme of events and talks, all centred around an exclusive commission by the pioneering interdisciplinary artist duo Elmgreen Dragset.
It’s the latest chapter in the longstanding dialogue between the Berlin-based artists and the fashion house. Though it isn t the product of an official collaboration, the best-known artefact of Elmgreen Dragset s interaction with the brand is “Prada Marfa”, the permanent sculptural installation of a Prada boutique in the Texan desert. Since then, the duo has also exhibited at Fondazione Prada.
Titled “The Audience”, the immersive, transient environment created by the duo centres on a cinema auditorium installed in the space’s main hall. On its screen, a blurred-out scene loops: a fraught chamber drama depicting an interaction between a creative couple – a painter and a writer – contemplating the nuances of their practices, their testing relationship, and the shortcomings of the respective audiences, in particular their attention spans. “There is a certain moment where the writer says to the painter: ‘But the art audience isn’t the real audience!’” Michael Elmgreen laughs. “‘I read somewhere that the art audience only spends 30 seconds on average in front of an artwork. Can you imagine someone reading a book in 30 seconds? Going to the cinema to watch a movie, and leaving after only half a minute?!”
While the film itself unfolds somewhere between abstract expressionist tableau and a streamed video rendered over a poor connection, the pair’s dialogue can be clearly heard, diffusing focus away from any direct relationship between sound and image and onto the surrounding space – in particular the chartreuse velvet chairs (identical to those found in the Fondazione Prada cinema in Milan), and the spectators sitting in them. Adding to the faint surreality and obscurity of the whole affair is the fact that a number of those spectators aren’t actually real – rather, they’re hyperrealistic sculptural figures, which only enhance the sense that you’ve crept into a screening late, and are tiptoeing past silent, glaring onlookers to find your seat.
“So many of our installations have been dealing with audience movements or interactions in different institutional spaces, and for this particular installation, we have kind of reversed the roles of the components of a cinema,” Ingar Dragset shares. “What you see is a completely blurred scene that looks like or seems like it’s taken out of a feature movie, but it’s looped in a way that you can’t quite tell when it begins or ends.”
Indeed, the whole experience is essentially designed to implicate you, the viewer, and to instigate an awareness around how, exactly, one is choosing to engage with or react to the context at hand. It’s a clever, meta-theatrical feat of installation, but what, one might fairly ask, is the point it’s trying to make?
The answer, at first, is as blurry as the film itself. This built environment is geared more towards creating space for reflection on relationships to collective cultural experiences, in a time where they are increasingly rare. It’s in keeping with the two artists’ long history of creating works that essentially intervene in public environments, ambitious sculptural works that point towards – without necessarily directly commenting on – salient social phenomena with humour and wit.
While, there’s certainly space for cerebral extemporising on the history of audience culture – its only relatively recent transition from a rowdy, participatory context to one of quiet, passive engagement, as Dragset points out – there’s also a more basic, more poignant truth at the installation’s heart: underscoring the value of community spaces. “When you go to the cinema, and you’re standing in the lobby, you often look around and think about what we all actually have in common?” ponders Elmgreen. “People look like they come from very different parts of society or have very different preferences on all other kinds of things in life, but they might have the same taste in movies. That was one of the inspirational points for us doing this installation, thinking about the beauty of gathering in civic spaces like cinemas, where we come together in spite of our differences, and share a moment watching a movie.”
In times where hyperconnectivity has, ironically, left us more disconnected than ever, “The Audience” serves as a welcome prompt to, if not reengage with, then at least recognise the value of “museums, concert halls, theaters and movie theaters that get people out” of their bubbles, Dragset adds, “where the world come to them through social media and what they watch on their phone. These places are so precious to keep in this period where the world seems so fractured. It seems we are all divided up in our own small universes and can’t come together over any issues, but you still have our cultural institutions where we meet, in spite of differences.”
That’s not, however, to say that there’s any “right” way to interact with the installation, though there’s plenty to draw people to it. Over its three days open to the public, “The Audience” – and Prada Mode more broadly – will not only play host to the screening, but also to an expansive programme of panel talks, workshops and film screenings, all taking “audiences” as their focal theme from a wide range of vantage points. Highlights include conversations between the artists and architect Elizabeth Diller; a screenwriting workshop led by Ray Grewal, inviting budding writers to pick up where the elusive film leaves off; and a screening of Quentin Dupieux’s Yannick, a hysterical French arthouse film that sees the logic of audience participation taken to outrageous extents. For the full programme, and information on how to register to attend, head here.