Q’s and A’s: Molly Nesbit with Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset pursue a conscious cultural position that abstracts from issues of power, sex, and marginalized or subcultural behavioural patterns in an alignment with architectonics and style – as ways of emphasizing the “private” as a reflection of the particular, singular, and non-generic in exploring social subject matters of class, privilege, gender, nationality. Molly Nesbit joins the artists Elmgreen & Dragset in this first time public presentation in New York City approaching their practice and production, as well as their role as theatre directors, assemblers and editors.

This event has been made possible with the support of the Danish Arts Council’s Committee for International Visual Art and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in relation to the selection of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset as artists/curators for the Danish and Nordic Pavilions in the 2009 Edition of the Venice Biennale in a project exploring a set of complex psychological structures based on devotion, desire, cultural ambitions, boredom, and vanity in relation to the sub-themes of “collecting” and “intimacy, sexuality, and queerness.”

About the Speakers Molly Nesbit is a Professor of Art History at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum. Her books include Atget's Seven Albums (Yale University Press, 1992) and Their Common Sense (Black Dog, 2000). With Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija she has been organizing "Utopia Station", an ongoing book, exhibition, seminar, website and street project. She is currently the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969) live and work in Berlin and have been collaborating since 1995. Through the last decade, they have been showing their works in numerous institutions including Tate Modern, Serpentine Gallery, MCA Chicago, New Museum, Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Hamburger Bahnhof, MMK Frankfurt, Louisiana Museum, Moderna Museet, Bergen Kunsthall and Kunsthalle Zürich.

[OCA, NYC] [OCA, NYC] is an experimental platform launched by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway to initiate projects, seminars, talks, screenings, and to host short-term residencies in New York City as an alternative and satellite space to OCA in Oslo, Norway. [OCA, NYC] is physically lodged within the historical Cunard Cruise Lines building (and former Police Museum), on the 2nd Floor of 25 Broadway, adjacent to Battery Park and accessible via subway by the 4, 5 at Bowling Green, the 1, R, W at Rector Street or the J, M, Z at Broad Street lines.

Q’s and A’s: Molly Nesbit with Elmgreen & Dragset
Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset
24. April, 7:00 pm