A freeze image. Three white statues stand out on an almost life-size tennis court in pavilion number two at Copenhagen Contemporary in the Danish capital. It is called Short Story, an installation by the artistic duo from Scandinavia, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, and presented for the first time at the König Galerie in Berlin in 2020. The main protagonists of this silent scene are Flo, Kev and Bogdan. The context is a tennis match that has just finished. You can understand this by the posture of the two white-lacquered bronze statues of the two young people, Flo e Kev – the first with a gaze fixed upon the shining trophy in his hands, with his shoulders turned away from the central net. The second man prostrated on the red rubber granulated ground, with spreadeagled arms and legs. There is no exultation for the victory, just a subdued discomfort. Flo isn’t proud of his success, he looks sad. His head is slightly reclined while the younger man, Kev, on the other side of the court, appears overwhelmed by defeat. Off court, in a wheelchair, snoozes the old man, Bogdan, with his drooping eyelids and his hands crossed over his stomach. He looks unrelated to the scene and indifferent to all that is going on around him. Is it he who is dreaming the tennis match? Maybe a long-lost memory from the past, indicated by the inscription 1969 on the cup? Or is he just a simple spectator? In the whole scene there are no unambiguous answers, all the possible narratives are open. What needs to be reflected upon are themes such as competition, selfishness, inclusion and exclusion and the rivalry between the winners and the losers. The loser is lying down exhausted, perhaps annihilated by the weight of his expectations. The winner has maybe come to the realisation that success at times does not give us a sense of satisfaction; perhaps this was an unjust victory. In any case, there is a total lack of communication between the three people, their gazes do not cross, and any interaction is only within each single figure.

The lack of certainty, the multiplicity of explanations and the exploration of social and political aspects in contemporary life are predominant characteristics in all the works of Elmgreen & Dragset, who were together both in art as well as in life from 1995 until 2005 and, since then, only professionally. Born, respectively, in Copenhagen and Trondheim, in Norway, they acquired fame towards the end of the 1990’s when they moved to Berlin where they purchased an old hydraulic station to turn it into their studio.

Their art has always been provocative and subversive and is heavily intertwined with architecture and design. Their participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 was an almost historic occasion with the installation of the work The collectors, with a dead collector, face down in a swimming pool. Among their most famous works there are Prada Marfa from 2005, a life-size replica of a Prada boutique bang in the middle of Texas and Short Cut from 2003, in which a caravan, pulled along by a car, sinks into the ground right in the middle of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. This installation is now permanently exhibited outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.