How did you start to collaborate? Working as a team or a couple can be remarkably challenging and you’ve done it for a long time.
Dragset: It’s as challenging as a marriage I guess [laughter]. We met in a very artistic way, in a club in Copehnhagen called After Dark in 1994. It’s exactly 20 years ago. At the time I was doing more performance theatre; Michael came from poetry and installation work. We combined the two and started out as performance artists as a couple, just using ourselves as material, doing these long ritualistic performances that lasted forever and were very poetic.
Elmgreen: Scandinavia at that time was similar to Hong Kong. Contemporary art didn’t really play a big role in culture as such, so it was not something you would think about doing, it would just happen. Young artists would never be invited to do a museum show. You would do projects in artist-run spaces and no one but your friends would come to look at it. That has of course all changed, especially due to promotion of Scandinavian art by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist who discovered the scene and started to promote it. In this way the development of contemporary art in Hong Kong and Scandinavia is kind of similar. It was a new thing that people started to be interested in. Now in Norway there are a lot of art collectors, but that is also something completely new.
Do you always agree on your projects? Or do you compromise?
E: We don’t compromise. That’s for politicians [laughter].
D: Of course, there are disagreements and there are ideas that we don’t use, or we go in another direction.
Just walking into this show felt like stepping into a theatre or film set. How great a role do other arts, like theatre and film, play in inspiring your work?
E: We are much more inspired by film than visual art. Filmmakers like Bergman or Hanneke…
D: …or Visconti.
E: We see the exhibition form as a sort of communication with the audience, like a filmmaker communicating with his audience.