KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Tomorrow is a long time

To create her videos, objects and installations, Rose Eken exploits the myths of Rock’n’roll and the culture surrounding it in the creation of new narratives. The aura and physical detritus surrounding a (rock)concert is her subject – mythically charged props are replicated, re-staged and also re-scaled. Eken’s works are never simply one-to-one renderings. Rather she changes scale and proportions, skewing and shifting reality. She creates a drum kit as a tiny miniature copy in cardboard, or inflates the grubby, revised setlist as a large cross-stitch embroidery on silk fabric. She remodels a roll of duct tape, a beer can or a microphone stand in glazed ceramic and makes a show of the mess and waste – the cultural debris left behind after a recording session or a club gig. Her works and objects are clearly handmade in a combination of meticulous crafts­manship and amateurish DIY style and it is exactly this combination, which makes them so poignant. By portraying the rebellious rock culture so zealously and in such atypical materials Eken deprives it of some of its ‘hardcore’ masculinity and rather bestows it with genuine feminine attention in return – an intensity and zeal that echo the dedication and endurance which characterizes the very essence of music making. In Künstlerhaus BethanienRose Eken is showing new sculptures, objects and embroidery produced in Berlin. The setting is laid out like a stage on which all that seems to be missing is the human presence.

Exhibition
17.06. – 10.07.2011
Tue - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
16.06.2011

Rose Eken is currently an artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien as a grantee of the Danish Arts Council.