Editorial Assistance
Elmgreen & Dragset: This Is How We Bite Our Tongue
Edited by Laura Smith and Habda Rashid
Published by Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2018
This Is How We Bite Our Tongue is published to accompany the first major UK survey exhibition of artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset, featuring a newly commissioned large-scale installation designed specifically for Whitechapel Gallery.
Since their first collaboration in 1995, Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Norway) have worked together to create beguiling architectural scenarios inhabited by an intriguing cast of characters. Their tragicomic environments present figures and objects that hover between reality and fiction, revealing the power structures embedded in everyday life.
For this exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset create an astonishing architectural simulacrum of a twentieth-century public amenity that once inspired joy, athleticism, hygiene, and transgression across Europe and America. Their immersive installation is elegiac yet urgent, offering a repost to the politically sanctioned and commercially driven erosion of civic and communal space today. This book offers a 360-degree tour of The Whitechapel Pool; a two-decade survey of Elmgreen & Dragset’s most iconic sculptures; and the duo’s ‘self-portraits,’ tributes to those artists who have influenced and inspired them.
Paralleling the visitor’s route through Elmgreen & Dragset’s sequence of installations, this book features insightful perspectives by Ann Lui, Habda Rashid, Laura Smith, and Minna Moore Ede, as well as the artists’ own voice in an enlightening exchange with Iwona Blazwick, and extracts by the poet Kate Tempest and from the film Paris, Texas, as chosen by the artists.
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Elmgreen & Dragsetlink
https://shop.whitechapelgallery.org/products/elmgreen-dragset-this-is-how-we-bite-our-tonguecredits
Publications Manager: Francesca VinterCopy Editor: Eileen Daly
Design: Studio Lorenz Klingebiel and Dominik Krauss
Photos: Whitechapel Gallery