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At Prada Mode London, Elmgreen & Dragset turned King’s Cross Town Hall into a living artwork, part cinema, part mirror, and reminded us that in the age of infinite screens, the real show might just be the audience itself.
At Prada Mode London, Elmgreen & Dragset turned King’s Cross Town Hall into a living artwork, part cinema, part mirror, and reminded us that in the age of infinite screens, the real show might just be the audience itself.
At Town Hall in King’s Cross this week, Prada threw open the doors to something a little strange and a lot brilliant. For its thirteenth Prada Mode, the brand handed the keys to artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who turned the freshly restored landmark into a place where the simple act of watching got put under the microscope.
Inside, there’s a cinema. Kind of. A film plays on loop, but it’s deliberately blurred, which means your brain spends most of the time trying (and failing) to make sense of it. Around you, five eerily lifelike sculptures of cinema-goers sit frozen in different stages of attention. One’s glued to the screen, another looks like they’re about to check their phone. It’s all a bit uncanny, and that’s the point. The work’s called The Audience, and it flips the camera straight back at us.
But Prada Mode was never just about the installation. Over two packed days, the building buzzed with talks, performances, and DJ sets, part art fair, party and group therapy for anyone with a phone addiction. Cultural scholar Kirsty Sedgman opened with a talk about how audiences behave, and misbehave, called “Sit Down and Be Quiet.” Think of it as a crash course in why we clap, gasp, and scroll. Later, production designers Shona Heath and James Price chatted with Paolo Moretti about what it means to design for an audience you’ll never fully know. The consensus? People will always surprise you.
And then, Prada did what it does best: blurred the boundaries between sound, art, and style. James Massiah drifted from spoken word to DJ set; Lynda Dawn and ENNY filled the room with live soul; and by evening, Mimi Xu, SBTRKT, and Call Super took over, layering rhythm and atmosphere through the building. Simply Prada doing what Prada does best by curating sound as an extension of its visual world.
Day two we saw Elizabeth Diller join Elmgreen & Dragset to talk about how cultural spaces can stay alive , less “do not touch” and more “come in, make it your own.” And in “The Audience Is Many,” Sir Isaac Julien, speaking with Efe Çakarel, unpacked what it means to make art for the cinema, the gallery, and the iPhone screen all at once.
Between conversations, the building hummed. Live performances from Calum Goring, Toby Webster, Léa Sen, Tony Njoku, and Bendik Giske filled the air; DJ BOBBY. kept spirits up in the courtyard. Everywhere you turned, someone was mid-conversation about what they’d just seen, or what they thought it meant. And maybe that’s what made The Audience click. It wasn’t about standing in front of an artwork and nodding sagely; it was about realising that, most of the time, we’re all just trying to pay attention, to each other, to the moment, to the blur on the screen.
If you missed the main event, The Audience is still open to the public at Town Hall. Go, grab a seat, and see if you can keep your eyes on the screen without wondering who’s watching you back.