Five hyperrealistic sculptures sit motionless among the seats of a movie theatre. They look like spectators, yet something sets them apart: their attention is fake, programmed, suspended. And Prada has a hand in this installation. The sculptures are none other than the protagonists of The Audience, the installation by Elmgreen & Dragset for the thirteenth edition of Prada Mode, which transforms the King’s Cross Town Hall in London into a cinema inhabited by silent presences.
Real spectators, sitting next to these perfectly sculpted figures, end up blurring their own position with theirs. They watch, but they know they are being watched. The projected film, deliberately out of focus, shows a painter and a writer in a dialogue that repeats on a loop, as if time had stopped. The uncertain image and the motionless bodies create a subtle tension, a reflection on vision itself: on what it means to witness, to participate, to concentrate in an age dominated by image overload and constant distraction.
With The Audience, Prada brings to London a meditation on the contemporary condition of the spectator. From 15 to 16 October the project took shape as a private club, then opened to the public from 17 to 19 October, coinciding with Frieze London. Inside the Town Hall, a recently restored historic building, the experience is completed by The Conversation, an additional sculpture depicting a woman alone at a café table, engaged in a video call with one of the characters from the film.
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Around this installation unfolds a programme of talks, screenings, performances, and DJ sets that broaden the discussion on the act of looking and on how collective experiences are constructed today. Yet it is in front of those hyperrealistic sculptures — motionless and yet alive — that the meaning of the entire project is revealed: a perfect mirror of our way of being spectators — distracted, hyperconnected, and yet always searching for an image that truly reflects us.
