Bunny Rogers at Kunsthaus Bregenz inspired by American funerals

The American artist set her first institutional solo show in Austria realizing also three huge installations as an ode to an end.

Bunny Rogers, Locker Room, 2020, Installation view third floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2020, Photo: Markus Tretter Courtesy of the artist © Bunny Rogers, Kunsthaus Bregenz

The American artist Bunny Rogers (born 1990 in Houston, Texas) set the first 2020 Kunsthaus exhibition. Outdoor and indoor, Bunny Rogers addresses public forms of mourning, making the subject accessible to an even wider public on the KUB Billboards on Bregenz’s Seestraße. In the bourg, she quotes images of public mourning accompanying the deaths of famous figures or victims of assassination, which have become branded into the collective memory. The large quantities of flowers, candles, pictures, toys and their cellophane wrappers, which ultimately turn into garbage represent a sort of recall, an echo. 

Indeed, the first installation, at Kunsthaus, set looks like an obscure glimpse in the dark. Bunny Rogers, for Kind Kingdom, displaced widest installations across all four floors of Kunsthaus Bregenz, mocking different scenarios and prevailing atmosphere, inspired by American funerals. The ground floor features heavy curtains, floral wreaths, and black ribboning, whilst elsewhere roses are visible that have been cast in concrete. Crowd control barriers are also employed. Visitors get through a scene, such as those outside Kensington Palace in London after Princess Diana’s death in a car accident 1997 in Paris. 

Bunny Rogers Cement Garden, 2020 Installation view second floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2020 Photo: Markus Tretter Courtesy of the artist © Bunny Rogers, Kunsthaus Bregenz
Bunny Rogers, Cement Garden, 2020, second floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2020

The mood of her work is rigorous and doleful. At the end of the Nineties, a small purple Princess Diana Beanie Baby teddy bear was produced in millions in memory of the Queen of Hearts, the proceeds from sales flowing into the princess’ charity foundation. Much subsequent a hype developed around the teddy bear as a collectable and object of financial speculation that is now traded online at high prices or as cheap fakes, and which can also be found on Rogers’ KUB billboards.

Bunny Rogers, Memorial, 2020, Installation view ground floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2020, Photo: Markus Tretter Courtesy of the artist © Bunny Rogers, Kunsthaus Bregenz
Bunny Rogers, Memorial, 2020, the first installation at Kunsthaus Bregenz

More in general, Peter Zumthor’s building provides an ideal setting for Rogers’ work, since she frequently invites her viewers into gloomy mise-en-scènes. Bunny Rogers graduated in 2012 from Parsons School of Design in New York with a BA in visual arts; she produces sculptures, installations, videos, and photographs. She has also become known for her poetry, which she presents online and at readings. She has exhibited at, amongst others, Hamburger Bahnhof, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, as well as being part of Ulrich Obrist’s project 89plus.

Figures from the Internet, television series, and video games are always part off her wide-scale installations. Rogers plays with identities in making a series of portraits of herself that are ultimately 3D models of television characters, players of a sudden choreography. Exactly as it happens on the Kunsthaus second floor: there a real lawn is being laid, while soil, rubbish, and withered flowers become metaphors for the poetic and painful, beauty and transience — an art that does not shy away from the eerie, to remind each of us of our own responsibilities. It is a memorial, because according to Bunny Rogers objective art is not possible.

Bunny Rogers, Memorial, 2020, Installation view, ground floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2020, Photo: Markus Tretter,  Courtesy of the artist © Kunsthaus Bregenz
Bunny Rogers, Memorial, 2020, gound floor installazion at the Kunsthaus

On the upper floor water sprinkles from a showerhead. The entire space has been laid with mud-gray, sepia-coloured tiles. The scenario that Bunny Rogers is staging is reminiscent of the shower cubicles found in schools or gyms. This eerily empty, apparently abandoned presentation of the space, with its sometimes-distressed tiling, becomes an uneasy tableau, a memento mori theatre. Death and mourning may be repressed in modern-day life, but in art they have always been a central subject, while expanded still-lives evoke our ephemeral fallacy. 

Title:
Bunny Rogers. Kind Kingdom
Opening Dates:
From January 18 to April 13, 2020
Curated by:
Dr. Rudolf Sagmeister
Venue:
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Address:
Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz, Austria

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