03.02.–18.03.2001

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been working together since 1995. Their "Powerless Structures" are an ongoing series of installations and performances in which the two artists examine space with its manifold possibilities of meaning and functions. The question of constructing meaning in private and public or insti-tutional space and its sexual connotation is fundamental for Elmgreen's and Dragset's works. By transferring spaces to other contexts of meaning, but also via targeted interventions in the way a space functions, Elmgreen and Dragset time and again succeed in shaking off the customary meanings of a space and thus creating room for new and different interpretations. All works of the artists therefore express the alterability of established structures.

In "Powerless Structures, Fig 111", the installation developed for Portikus, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset will carry out construction measures to arch the hall's floor and skylight towards each other by more than one meter. Through this intervention, the architecture of Portikus, which is actually austere and rational, appears to soften, it seems elastic, and the modernist principle of an exhibition space as a white cube, which solely serves to present art and has no additional meaning of its own, is reversed. The neutrality of the exhibition space as well as the determination of the space as an art space is transgressed: the space itself becomes a work of art.

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are also present until February 17, 2001, in the exhibition project "Exchange" at Städelschule with "Powerless Structures, Fig 112", a Nomadic White Cube created especially for this exhibition.

Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961 in Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969 in Norway) live and work in Berlin.