Deutsche Museen

Deutsche Museen (German Museums) forms the photographic supplement to the project series "Powerless Structures," in which Elmgreen & Dragset illustrate the fragility of space-producing structures. While in the installations and performances the institutional determinants of the production and reception of art are challenged by way of targeted spatial interventions, the photographic prints offer a direct view of the empty interior spaces of eight German museums. The absence of any intervention exposes the homogeneity of exhibition culture and refutes the supposed neutrality of these spaces: robbed of their function they themselves become the art work. Using the example of the White Cube, the utopian idea of an objective, value-free exhibition space is questioned to show that art needs to be understood as a spatially and situationally produced relation.