During this year’s Frieze week in London, Prada Mode transformed King’s Cross’s newly restored Town Hall into something between a film set, an artwork, and a social experiment. For its thirteenth edition, the cultural club invited artists Elmgreen & Dragset to reimagine the act of watching itself. The result, The Audience, was less an installation than an immersive study in attention — a cinema sculpted from observation, repetition, and the subtle drama of spectatorship.
Inside, a looped, intentionally hazy film flickered across the screen. The room pulsed with presence: five hyper-realistic figures sat among the audience, locked in perpetual observation, their stillness uncanny against the living crowd. Nearby, The Conversation, a solitary woman Face Timing a film character, extended this interplay between the seen and the unseen, collapsing the divide between screen and reality.
Over its first two days, Prada Mode London staged talks and performances that echoed its central theme: how we look, how we gather, and how meaning emerges in the act of witnessing. Highlights included Kirsty Sedgman’s playful “Sit Down and Be Quiet” lecture on audience behaviour, Shona Heath and James Price’s deep-dive into cinematic set design, and a dialogue between Elizabeth Diller and Elmgreen & Dragset on architecture, institutions, and the public gaze.
Open to the public this weekend (October 17—19), The Audience proves that spectatorship can be as performative as art itself — a mirror in which we find not just what we see, but how we choose to see it.
Words by Martin Onufrowicz
