Dead Ringers is an installation commissioned by ArkDes, Sweden's national center for architecture and design, for the exhibition Public Luxury. The project is a study of Stockholm’s smallest public buildings – like phone booths, public restrooms and photo kiosks. These kinds of public spaces are a current concern simply because they are becoming extinct. Some, like phone booths, are rapidly being removed because of technological shifts. Others are threatened because they are at odds with prevailing ideals for public spaces, like transparency and openness. Dead Ringers critically turns this tendency into new opportunities. It proposes to selectively replace removed booths with mysterious near-copies that provide similar types of enclosed public spaces, without the narrow functional focus of phone and photo booths. Most if not all of Stockholm’s urban booths are immediately recognisable as small figures in the urban fabric. At the turn of the last century some models featured shingle clad pitched roofs and slender legs, while more recent ones are monolithic, rectilinear volumes made from formed metal panels. What ties them together, despite stylistic differences, is the fact that they all have been shaped after the human body. Their anthropomorphic features include vertical proportions, symmetry, and a clear division into base, enclosure and roof. Each proposed Dead Ringer samples and tweaks these ideal proportions and perfect symmetries of historical booths, recasting them as imperfect and multivalent individuals. Public Luxury is curated by ArkDes director Kieran Long, with Daniel Golling and Marie-Louise Richards.