This promises to be the most dull exhibition yet staged by the Serpentine. The gallery’s brief resumé could hardly make it sound more dull. A pair of Northern European artists with unpromisingly guttural names will use “sculptures, installations and an encyclopaedic style catalogue to focus attention on welfare systems in the Western world”. As a cultural experience, this could probably rank with snuggling up on a sofa with the latest copy of Understanding Your Tax Code.

When I suggest as much to Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the pair of Berlin-based artists responsible, they both burst out laughing. “That’s why we titled our installation The Welfare Show,” they tell me. “It’s a contradiction in terms: ‘show’ suggests entertainment, but to even mutter the word ‘welfare’ is to send people to sleep.”

And yet, like most jokes, this has a serious flip side. The welfare system today is more about show than anything else, the artists explain. Politicians may pay lip service to its principles, but real economic policy is focused elsewhere. The much-vaunted Scandanavian model of social security no longer really exists.

Elmgreen and Dragset (born in 1961 and 1969, respectively) met 12 years ago — in “the dirtiest gay disco in Copenhagen”, apparently. The former was a poet — though, since only about one person in a million reads contemporary poetry, he tells me, as a Danish writer he had an audience of about five. The latter — a Norwegian — worked in the theatre. And their meeting led to “the longest one-night stand ever”.

They started working together as performance artists — it seemed a logical way to combine their respective talents. At first they were lovers (they no longer are) and based their work on their lives, making pieces that challenged the clichés of gay iconography. This slowly led to a wider questioning of social structures and the way they exercise control.

They made a replica of a gallery, for instance, and then buried it in the ground so that the spectator could look into it from above to see exactly what sort of entity it was. “We wanted to view different topics from different angles,” the artists say, “to open up as many different perspectives as we could.” They made a series of pieces that explored spatial issues, questioning the design of public spaces and wondering how they could be changed.

Their new show at the Serpentine continues these investigations. Elmgreen and Dragset have transformed the interior of the gallery into a series of institutional spaces, through which the visitor is led like a passenger on a ghost ride. The spooks are boredom, anonymity, solitude and endless, monotonous, mind-numbing waiting.

“We built it especially for you here in Britain,” Elmgreen laughs. “You lot are always waiting — for buses and cabs, in pubs and clubs, at cash-machines and shop counters. You seem to love it, so we thought we will offer you that experience.”

“Socks at Woolworths £1.99 a pair,” says the sign at the show’s entrance. Clearly the main attraction is not up to much. You are offered two choices — to turn left or right. It doesn’t matter which you opt for — you will end up at the same place.

Most people turn right, attracted by flashing lights on a pole-dancer’s podium. It is empty except for the abandoned paraphernalia — the mops, sponges and buckets — of a cleaner. This sculpture evokes two types of traditional — but solitary and not particularly valued — forms of female labour.

Moving on, you push through hospital swing doors and enter a corridor with two beds: one already occupied, one waiting for you. “Hospital is a passage in most of our lives at some point,” says Dragset. “One of our democratic rights is to get a bed in a hospital corridor and wait.”

The spectator continues through a waiting room in which a number dispenser prints out its tickets while the digital display blinks an endless succession of zeros; past an airport carousel in which a single piece of uncollected baggage spins; through a room full of gallery guards who preside over emptiness.

They evoke the mindless monitoring of our social systems, explain the artists, the officialdom that, without making direct contact, constantly checks. The “guards” have all been recruited from the job centre.