Elmgreen & Dragset: Prague Diaries (performance)

As part of the READ exhibition, witness the unconventional performance called Prague Diaries, where a group of five men writes their personal diaries. This happens every Wednesday and every weekend throughout the exhibition until 22 April, 2024.

In Gallery 1, visitors will encounter familiar library structures, such as rows of bookshelves, an information desk, tables with reading lamps, and a public restroom. Artworks will appear throughout the space, sometimes tucked into bookshelves.

Beyond the shelves, visitors will find the fifth iteration of the duo's durational performance, Diaries. Originally presented as Paris Diaries at Perrotin in 2003, the artists have subsequently presented the performance as Istanbul (2013), Hong Kong (2015), and Dallas Diaries (2019). 

Prague Diaries feature five young men seated at a long table during Wednesdays and weekends throughout the run of the exhibition. The audience will encounter the performers keeping their diaries; visitors are free to walk around, read over the diarists’ shoulders, and flip through the notebooks when the performers are on a break. 

Elmgreen & Dragset 

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have held solo shows worldwide at institutions including Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Serpentine Galleries and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, the SMK National Gallery of Denmark and most recently Fondazione Prada in Milan. In 2009, they received a special mention for their exhibition The Collectors in the Danish and the Nordic Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Their most well-known works are Prada Marfa, a permanent installation of a closed luxury goods store in the middle of the Texas dessert, and the large-scale outdoor sculpture Van Gogh’s Ear that depicts an upright swimming pool, first shown at the Rockefeller Plaza in New York and now on display in Wuhan, China.

© Vojtěch Veškrna

© Filip Kopecký