Bunny Rogers
Ghost Joan 2, 2022
Rat print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth 305 gsm, artist's frame faced with silver leaf, black silver
149 × 117,5 × 4,5 cm
About the work
For Ghost Joan 2 (2022), Bunny Rogers takes the figure of Joan of Arc as her starting point. Rogers uses her as an alter ego, bringing together through this figure several themes from her own artistic practice.
Rogers herself grew up in online communities, where she developed various avatars. This experience forms an important background to her work, in which identity, isolation and the sense of belonging repeatedly emerge.
Her world constantly shifts between the physical and the virtual. She works with sculpture, installation, photography, video, animated films, websites, 3D modelling, poetry and publications. Together, these media form a world that feels both strange and familiar.
In Ghost Joan 2, Rogers uses Joan of Arc to explore this world further. Through polished surfaces, digitally enhanced bodies and sterile faces, she encourages viewers to look beyond the surface.
In doing so, she connects the figure of Joan of Arc to themes of feminism and other sociopolitical issues.
Throughout Rogers's wider body of work, experience, memory, community life, friendship, emotions and identity continually recur. The personal and the universal merge into one another. The same applies to reality and fiction: the two worlds influence each other and cannot always be clearly distinguished.
Her creative process also reflects this blending. Rogers borrows techniques from theatrical costume-making, design and industrial furniture production, and often makes her works by hand. As a result, her objects can feel at once sleek and intimate, highly constructed yet sincere.
Ghost Joan 2 is situated precisely within this tension: a historical figure becomes an alter ego and is given a place within a contemporary world of digital bodies, avatars and constructed identities.
Bunny Rogers
° 1990 in Houston, United States. Lives and works in New York.
Bunny Rogers is a visual artist, poet and performer. She lives and works in New York. Her practice spans multiple disciplines and has been exhibited internationally.
Rogers has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, De 11 Lijnen in Oudenburg and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. More recently, Société in Berlin presented her solo exhibition My Original Friend.
She has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions at venues including the Palais de Tokyo and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the New Museum in New York, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk and OCAT Shanghai.
Rogers is also the author of the publications My Apologies Accepted and Cunny Poem Vol. 1 & 2. Her work is held in major public collections, including K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Hamburger Bahnhof, the Julia Stoschek Foundation, the Louisiana Museum, MMK Frankfurt and the Whitney Museum in New York.