Tomorrow – Elmgreen and Dragset, V&A

Norwegian/Danish artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset often inspire disbelief, frequently due to their knack for getting high-profile institutions to lend them their valuable brand images for the purposes of artistic meddling. You might remember the deserted Prada outlet (Prada Marfa) they constructed in 2005 along a remote stretch of the Texan highway, which exists as a permanent installation even today. This time around it’s the Victoria and Albert Museum that has given the artists free reign with their premises and property.

Their new installation, Tomorrow, is presented as an ‘unrealised film project’ set in an opulent apartment which occupies several of the museum’s huge former textile galleries. The apartment is frozen in time in August 2013 and decked out with objects from the V&A’s collection along with artworks by Elmgreen and Dragset themselves and the quotidian belongings of its fictional former occupant, Norman Swann – a fictional architect in the doldrums of disillusionment. 

Despite its huge size, the mocked-up apartment is realised in incredible detail.  Among the artefacts in Swann’s apartment, sharp-eyed visitors might spot a few visual references to Elmgreen and Dragset’s 2012 rocking-horse sculpture for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. And those who are more familiar with the artists’ work may recognise elements from their 2009 Venice Biennale project The Collectors.

Visitors are encouraged to roam Swann’s apartment freely, its contents are not kept in vitrines or behind ropes, but are available to be browsed at leisure. Somewhere, among the books and magazines scattered on Swann’s coffee table, you might stumble upon a paperback copy of Elmgreen and Dragset’s screenplay for Tomorrow, describing the very scene into which they have just stumbled. But to give away any more about what is to be found inside would be unfair of us…

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