This Frieze Week, Prada’s Surreal Cinema By Berlin’s Coolest Installation Artists Is A Must-See

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.

Photography Stephen James. Courtesy of Prada.

It’s the latest chapter in the longstanding relationship between the Berlin-based artists and the fashion house – the best-known artefact of which is “Prada Marfa”, the permanent sculptural installation of a Prada boutique in the Texan desert. The duo has also previously 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?!”

Photography Stephen James. Courtesy of Prada.

Photography Stephen James. Courtesy of Prada.

Photography Stephen James. Courtesy of Prada.

Photography Stephen James. Courtesy of Prada.

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.”