17/1/2025
Collaborative art is increasingly gaining prominence, with more artists embracing group or collective practices to explore new creative possibilities. Institutions are also playing a pivotal role by advocating for collaborative art and supporting the growth of art collectives, as highlighted by the diverse processes shared by leading collectives in the Artspace article.
Michael Elmgreen (born 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (born 1969 in Trondheim, Norway) have been collaborating since 1995. Their practice investigates the intersections of art, architecture, and design. Based in London and Berlin, Elmgreen & Dragset are renowned for their work, which blends wit and subversive humour with a focus on social and cultural issues.
Well-known for placing a Prada boutique in the Texan desert in 2005, this permanent art installation features an inaccessible interior showcasing luxury goods from Prada's Fall 2005 collection. The door remains sealed, ensuring the structure never operates as a functional store. Prada Marfa is a provocative site-specific artwork that critiques consumerism by appropriating the visual language of luxury branding, but its effectiveness as a critique is questionable. While it draws from pop art and land art traditions, it simultaneously risks elevating and romanticising the very brand it seeks to interrogate. The installation, though challenging the commercialization of culture, operates in a way that potentially reinforces the prestige and exclusivity of the Prada label, making it more of an advertisement than a subversion. Its ambiguity raises questions about whether it offers a genuine critique of consumerism or simply becomes another glossy symbol of the commercial world it attempts to critique.
One of the excellent showcases was The Well Fair, Elmgreen & Dragset's project offers a contemporary critique of art fairs, drawing on institutional critique and relational aesthetics to challenge the commercial and spatial structures of these events. Parodying the grid-like setup of art fairs, they expose the market-driven logic that underpins them, echoing pop art’s exploration of consumer culture. Their use of identical booths and twin gallerists subverts notions of originality and value, while their refusal to sell artworks or open a VIP room dismantles social hierarchies. By reimagining the art fair as a fictionalised limbo, they prompt a deeper reflection on the performative and transactional nature of art spaces in a commercialised world.
By embedding humour and provocation into their works, Elmgreen & Dragset continuously blur the lines between critique and complicity, inviting audiences to grapple with the contradictions of contemporary culture.
In 1975, Marina Abramović and Uwe F. Laysiepen, better known as Ulay, crossed paths in Amsterdam and immediately identified one another as kindred spirits in the realm of Tantra. Sharing the same birth date, though Ulay is three years older, the duo is often noted for their striking resemblances in physical features, personal aesthetics, and shared life goals. From that pivotal meeting onward, they embarked on a profound artistic partnership centred on exploring and harmonising the dynamic interplay between masculine and feminine energies. Before joining forces, both had independently undertaken artistic journeys that involved breaking down conventional identities—at times through intense, painful processes—cultivating the inner openness that aligns with Tantric ideals.
Marina Abramović and Ulay were one of the most renowned and trailblasing artistic duos in the world. Marina Abramović and Ulay's 1980 performance piece Rest Energy is a visceral embodiment of trust, vulnerability, and the delicate balance of human connection. Lasting just four minutes, the performance creates an extraordinary intensity through its simplicity: Ulay holds a drawn bow, while Abramović positions herself as the target, clutching the other end of the taut arrow pointed directly at her heart. Both performers lean backward, placing their lives in each other's hands, as the amplified sounds of their heartbeats and breathing fill the space.
This work is not simply a meditation on danger or physical tension; it is a profound exploration of relational dynamics. Rest Energy exemplifies how two individuals can simultaneously depend on and endanger one another in a precarious equilibrium. It transforms a simple act of trust into a metaphor for the complexities of intimacy, partnership, and shared existence. The live heartbeat audio intensifies the viewer’s awareness of time and mortality, turning the performance into a raw confrontation with the fragility of life itself.
What makes Rest Energy so striking is its economy of gesture. There are no elaborate props or narratives—just two bodies, an arrow, and a profound commitment to the moment. This simplicity invites viewers to project their interpretations, creating a layered and universally resonant experience. In a career marked by pushing physical and emotional limits, Abramović and Ulay's work here encapsulates the essence of their partnership: bold, uncompromising, and deeply human.
Wu Shanzhuan, born in 1960 in Zhoushan, China, pursued his studies at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and later at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. Inga Svala Thórsdóttir, born in Iceland in 1966, studied at the Icelandic School of Arts and Crafts before continuing her education at the same institution in Hamburg. The duo currently resides and works in Hamburg, where they continue their artistic practice.
Their joint exhibition From Paper to Paper, recently featured on Long March Space, exemplifies their distinctive ability to interrogate systems of meaning and explore the interplay between form and content. This duo’s practice is as much about the intellectual as it is about the material, creating works that are richly layered yet approachable.
Thórsdóttir and Wu's use of text and symbols is a hallmark of their practice. They treat language as a mutable material, breaking it apart and reassembling it to question its inherent power structures. This approach creates a sense of playful yet rigorous inquiry, where the viewer is invited to decode and engage with the art on multiple levels. Their exploration of dualities—such as chaos and order, logic and absurdity—resonates deeply in our increasingly polarized world.
What sets this duo apart is their ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary. Everyday objects and paper-based materials, often overlooked in their simplicity, are elevated in their work to vessels of meaning and philosophical inquiry. This transformation is not merely aesthetic but conceptual, asking viewers to reconsider their relationship with the familiar.
Daniel and Alon are members of Cooking Sections, an artistic duo that investigates the systems shaping the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. Using site-responsive installations, performances, and video, their practice confronts the overlapping boundaries of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics. Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections uses food as both a lens and a tool to expose landscapes of exploitation, ecological breakdown, and the metabolic inequalities underpinning global food systems. Since 2015, they have run CLIMAVORE, a long-term, site-responsive project exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolize climate breakdown.
The two artists first met during their postgraduate studies at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, where they discovered the inherent political nature of space through interdisciplinary learning. This led them to delve deeper into how architecture is used by states or corporate giants for political and economic gain, and the consequent costs borne by the environment, individual citizens, and marginalised communities.
Through mediums such as installations, performances, maps, and videos, Cooking Sections continuously brings issues like climate change, food consumption, and geopolitics to public attention. Their long-term project Climavore advocates for moving beyond the simplistic notion of seasonal eating, instead integrating food production and consumption with the complexities of climate change and adjusting practices accordingly. In a world where climates are ever-shifting, with droughts and floods constantly reshaping human and architectural landscapes, timely and adaptive food practices emerge as a potential response to these challenges.
The artist duos explored here exemplify the transformative power of collaboration in contemporary art. Each partnership brings unique perspectives and methodologies, reshaping how we view art's role in addressing pressing social, cultural, and ecological issues.
Through their innovative practices, these duos not only expand the boundaries of artistic expression but also underscore the importance of collaboration as a means to amplify ideas, foster dialogue, and catalyze change. As the art world becomes increasingly global and interconnected, their work reminds us that partnerships can challenge conventions, tackle complex issues, and create enduring legacies. Their collective practices serve as a testament to the profound potential of working together to shape the art—and the world—of tomorrow.