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Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset

CCA Kitakyushu Project Gallery presented a new installation by Elmgreen & Dragset.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s new installation at CCA Project Gallery, entitled Constructed Catastrophes, Fig. 2 showed a collapsed bridge, which is crossing the gallery room and dividing the space into two parts. However, this accident is a planned one – it is a constructed (programmed) catastrophe – a piece of engineering that has been designed to fail. With its uncanny aesthetics the work seduces the viewer into an ambiguous position between visual attraction and evoking the consciousness of the endless stream of horrors that the media presents to us. On a daily basis we are confronted with news of either natural, ecological or war related disasters, which set us off an entire range of emotional reactions. This overwhelming attack of visual information makes us react with either fear, concern, anger, apathy or even with a certain perverted fascination of the visual cruelties. Such a fascination could possibly be explained by the desperate, unconscious longing for radical change, which is triggered by any dissatisfied life situation – a change which nevertheless seems out of reach for most people. And the sudden accident as it is presented in the media becomes, in spite of its cruelty, a sort of a displaced symbol of potential change.

Constructed Catastrophes, Fig. 2 highlights the fragility of our modern urban infrastructure and communication systems, but it also comforts the spectator by the fact that this scenario is just a staged one – a homage to our individual powerlessness and at the same time a warning about turning this powerlessness into a collective paranoia.

Media analysts have throughout decades proven in what ways all major broadcasting companies manipulate and even stage their reports from various catastrophes. The accident, which Elmgreen & Dragset presented to us in the gallery space, is underlining its own designed and fictional character.

Elmgreen & Dragset stayed as Professors of Research Program at CCA Kitakyushu from November 25th to December 23rd, 2003.

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