Prada Mode takes over London

In October, Prada will stage one of the most amazing events to coincide with Frieze week. The thirteenth edition of Prada Mode, this time will occupy the newly restored Town Hall in King’s Cross. The Italian fashion house has invited Elmgreen & Dragset, artists long fascinated by the politics of spectatorship and social behaviour, to create The Audience, an installation that turns the act of watching into both subject and stage.

The duo have transformed Town Hall into a cinema that seems to observe itself. Inside, a deliberately blurred film, written by Elmgreen & Dragset, plays on a constant loop. The scene is simple: a painter and a writer talk about their creative lives in a flat. It feels unfinished, cyclical, like a memory caught between clarity and fog. Five hyperrealistic sculptures of cinema-goers sit scattered across the auditorium, their bodies locked in various gestures of attention and distraction, absorbed, bored, half-present.

The narrative spills out beyond the screening room with The Conversation, a single sculpture depicting a woman alone at a café table, FaceTiming one of the film’s characters. Reality leaks into fiction, and vice versa. Visitors become part of the mise-en-scène, complicit in the act of looking.

“The work is about redirecting the gaze,” Elmgreen & Dragset explain. “We’re interested in situations where the viewer’s focus is pulled in conflicting directions, where uncertainty becomes part of the experience. Being in an audience is a collective act, but also one of self-awareness.”

This is Prada’s thirteenth Mode, its itinerant social club that fuses art, conversation, and nightlife, previously hosted by artists from Theaster Gates to Damien Hirst. In London, The Audience becomes both a sculpture and a social experiment, inviting reflection on how we consume images, and how easily we become the subjects of our own spectacle.

Alongside the installation, a programme of talks, screenings, performances, and DJ sets will further probe what it means to gather and to watch. The fantastic programme will include spoken words by James Massiah, live music performance by Lynda Dawn, by Enny, a conversation with Isaac Julien, live acting performance with Calum Goring and Toby Webster and DJ set by Bobby among other amazing performers.

The first two days will be open exclusively to members; from October 17 to 19, the public will be invited in too. With Prada Mode, Frieze Week promises to be unforgettable.

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