Bunny Rogers: Kind Kingdom

For its first exhibition in 2020 Kunsthaus Bregenz is presenting the US-American artist Bunny Rogers. The architecture and unadorned concrete of Peter Zumthor’s building provide an ideal setting for Rogers’ work, since she frequently invites her viewers into gloomy mise-en-scènes.

Death and mourning may be repressed in modern-day life, but in art they have always been a central subject. Still lifes evoking mortality are part of art history, as are memento mori. For Bregenz, Bunny Rogers is planning expansive installations across all four floors of the building, the various scenarios and prevailing atmosphere being 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. A real lawn is being laid on two floors. 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, “objective art is impossible,” according to Bunny Rogers.

This eerily empty, apparently abandoned presentation of the space, with its sometimes distressed tiling, becomes an uneasy tableau, transforming KUB into a unique site that is not merely theatrical, but also a critical and political one interrogating the present.