Miuccia Prada and the artist Carsten Höller “are to set up a “Prada Congo Bar” in London in the autumn, a four-month installation project that will contain two bars, one African and one European, and an “in-between area”. Fashion meets globalisation in the hedonistic metropolis.”

Carsten Holler’s Upside-Down Mushroom Room, in the collection of the Fondazione Prada.
Image: nytimes.com

Read more about Ms. Prada’s plans for a new art foundation in Milan, designed by Rem Koolhaas. Click HERE.

More on Carsten Holler HERE.

This idea seems rather similar to Vera Frenkel’s work …from the Transit Bar, which was first shown at documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992.

From the Transit Bar, 1992, six-channel video-disc installation and functional piano bar, documenta IX, Kassel, Germany.
Image: Canadacouncil.ca

The piece, by the pioneering Canadian artist, is “a six-channel video installation in the form of a fully functioning piano bar, with daily newspapers, palms, a pianist and a bartender. Here the visitor can sit down, relax, read a newspaper, and order a drink - a glass of juice, whisky or vodka - from the bartender.

The visitor is drawn into a space where documentary and fictional realities, present and past, art and life meet, and occasionally change places. The monitors in the bar allow us to share in 14 individuals’ personal experiences of displacement and exile.

The stories are about the experience of finding oneself between cultures, about love, about the bar. Here, displacement is as fundamental as the casual intimacy of the things revealed in the bar under the protection of its anonymity, which lets strangers talk to each other about their own lives.”

Read more about Ms. Frenkel and her installation HERE.