Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich

Elmgreen & Dragset: „Silent wishes and broken dreams ...“

May 30 – July 30, 2011

The potential for exciting and thought-provoking dialogue between theatre and fine art is amply demonstrated by the theatrical-performative installations by Danish-Norwegian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. The groups of works they presented in the Bayerische Staatsoper responded in various ways to the opera’s 2010/2011 season theme of unfreely free while at the same time forging a bridge between the institution of theatre and real life.

The exhibition showed theatrical sets involving exaggerated reiterations of scenes of human activity in all their complexity. In this respect, the Bayerische Staatsoper proved, in many ways, an enhancing environment for the works by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset from the Sammlung Goetz. The works entered into a dialogue with the public as well as with the historical architecture of the operahouse, vividly symbolising the role that opera still plays even today as a mirror of human desires and the universal questions of love, jealously and social convention. It is, above all, the way they address the opposite poles of the private and the public, and their analyses of sociological structures and conflicts, that lend the work of Elmgreen & Dragset its potent social relevance, making it positively predestined for such an unusual form of presentation in a public but non-museum context. Coinciding with this exhibition, films by Elmgreen & Dragset as well as Laurie Simmons were screened at Pavillon 21 MINI Opera Space – a Bayerische Staatsoper’s temporary mobile performance venue.

The exhibition was a joint project of Bayerische Staatsoper, Museum Villa Stuck and the Sammlung Goetz. It was curated by Verena Hein und Karsten Löckemann.