Prada Mode Heads to Dubai Linking Again With Damien Hirst

  Prada Mode is headed to Dubai with a reprise of Damien Hirt’s “Parmacy” installation.

The format, which consists of a social club created to provide members with art programming, late-night music performances and dining, will take place on Nov. 9 and 10 at the ICD Brookfield Place, a skyscraper designed by Foster + Partners in the heart of Dubai International Financial Centre, already home to international corporations as well high-end restaurants and bars.

The eighth installment of the roving club, Prada Mode Dubai will mark the fourth time the immersive installation has been mounted and exhibited.

Following the seminal work of art and the “Pharmacy” restaurants set up in London’s Notting Hill in 1998 — for which Prada provided staff uniforms — and at Newport Street Gallery, Hirst recreated the space in 2021 for Prada Mode’s sixth installment in Moscow at the Levenson Mansion, a pre-Revolutionary stately building located in the city’s Patriarch Ponds area.

In Dubai, floor-to-ceiling medicine cabinets recreating a functional pharmacy filled with furniture, molecule scale models, light boxes and wallpaper bearing catalogues of prescription medicines will animate the space.

“I’m thrilled and honored to be invited by Miuccia Prada to recreate ‘Pharmacy’ for Prada Mode in Dubai after our successful collaboration in Moscow,” Hirst said. “I’m working really hard with a complicated but beautiful space, ICD Brookfield Place, to create harmony between the inside and outside of the new building. Once again, Prada have found a space that will provide the perfect place for it.”

Across the two-day event, the Prada club will also offer panel discussions and nightly entertainment featuring performances and live music, to be complemented by dining and drinking experiences.

“I’ve always thought great restaurants can be seen as art, and art without the evidence as we always remember great meals on great evenings with great people in great places and in this way ‘Pharmacy’ is definitely a kinetic artwork that works best filled with people and art existing and living and breathing and eating and drinking and enjoying themselves as one,” Hirst noted.

After wrapping up the members-only club, Hirst’s “Pharmacy” installation will be open to the public Nov. 11 and 12.

As reported, the inaugural Prada Mode was staged during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018. The following year the format touched down at Art Basel Hong Kong and Frieze London, while in 2020 Prada brought the members club to Paris and to Shanghai, where the brand invited producer, director and writer Jia Zhang-Ke to transform the Prada Rong Zhai villa with a site-specific installation called Miàn based on his cinematic work.

Last year, the COVID-19-disrupted edition in Moscow was held in December, while earlier this year, the format touched down in Los Angeles, California, during Frieze featuring a collaboration with artist Marine Syms.