Town Hall in King’s Cross, freshly restored to its civic splendour, opened its doors this October not as a government building but as a stage for observation. Inside, Prada (Instagram) presented the thirteenth edition of Prada Mode, the itinerant social club that fuses art, culture, and conversation, in collaboration with the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Over five days, the historic hall transformed into The Audience, an installation that blurred the line between sculpture, cinema, and spectatorship itself.
Elmgreen & Dragset, long fascinated by the choreography of looking, designed the space as a theatre of attention. Guests entered a dimly lit auditorium where an intentionally blurred film looped continuously: a painter and a writer talking in their flat about creative practice, their dialogue muffled, their gestures familiar yet indistinct. The scene repeated endlessly, offering no climax, no clear narrative, only the echo of process and the rhythm of watching.
In the seats among visitors sat five hyperrealistic sculptures of cinemagoers, their silicone faces eerily attentive, their stillness at odds with the restless audience around them. The uncanny precision of their presence unsettled the gaze: at any moment, one could mistake art for life, or vice versa. The work turned the spectators into performers, implicating them in the same act of observation they came to witness.
Beyond the screening room, a lone sculpture titled The Conversation extended the narrative. A woman sat at a café table, FaceTiming one of the film’s unseen characters, a gesture so ordinary it felt almost private. Here, the artists folded the digital into the sculptural, revealing how screens mediate intimacy, how we live half-present in the glow of connection.
As Elmgreen & Dragset put it, “The Audience is a work about spectatorship and redirecting the gaze of the visitors.” Their practice has long played with these reversals, from the faux luxury of Prada Marfa to the boy on a rocking horse atop Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, inviting us to reconsider where meaning resides: in the artwork, in the viewer, or somewhere in between. At Prada Mode, this dynamic felt especially pointed. In an age of infinite scrolling and image fatigue, attention itself has become both precious and performative.
During the members-only opening nights, guests moved between screenings, talks, and performances, the air humming with the strange intimacy of shared looking. Later, when the space opened to the public, The Audience became something else entirely: a collective portrait of how we watch, record, and remember. It was immersive without spectacle, conceptual without coldness, the rare kind of installation that made people linger longer than they intended.
By the time visitors stepped back into the night, the distinction between film and feeling, sculpture and self, had quietly collapsed. The Audience was not about what you saw, but about how you saw, and perhaps, how much you still wanted to.
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