KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Künstler*innen

Rose Eken

Denmark

The world of rock music and fan culture is the focus of Rose Eken’s artistic practice. Using a wide array of media such as ceramics, embroidery, video, watercolour painting and miniature models, Eken (re)constructs scenarios borrowed from rock music and culture. But rather than creating faithful copies, her works play with scale and proportions to distort reality. The artist thus crafts a drum kit as a miniature cardboard copy, inflates a grubby, revised set list as a large cross-stitch embroidery on lush silk fabric, or remodels a roll of duct tape and a beer can in glazed ceramic. Eken makes a show of the mess and the waste – the cultural debris – left behind after a recording session or a club gig. By portraying the rebellious rock culture so zealously and with such atypical materials, she partly deprives it of its masculinity and bestows it instead with an arguably feminine attention for detail. Eken toils with her embroideries in much the same way a guitarist picks his guitar. And she succeeds in transforming the ephemeral and fleeting into art objects replete with intrinsic references which extend far beyond the individual set list, can of beer, cigarette butt or half-eaten kebab. (Excerpt from: Maria Kjær Themsen, REmake/REmodel. Rose Eken 2008–2010, 2010).

STAY
01.02. – 31.07.2011

WEBSITE
www.roseeken.dk