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Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Aura Rosenberg

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Installation view at 313 N. Fairfax Avenue

Aura Rosenberg, Christopher Williams / Bram

Aura Rosenberg

Christopher Williams / Bram

1997/ 2015

Archival pigment print on cotton

76 x 60 in / 193 x 152.4 cm

Edition of 1 plus 1 AP

Aura Rosenberg, Sam Lewitt / Carmen

Aura Rosenberg

Sam Lewitt / Carmen

2008 / 2015

Archival pigment print on cotton

76 x 60 in / 193 x 152.4 cm

Edition of 1 plus 1 AP

Aura Rosenberg, Laurie Simmons / Lena

Aura Rosenberg

Laurie Simmons / Lena

1996-98/ 2015

Archival pigment print on cotton

76 x 60 in / 193 x 152.4 cm

Edition of 1 plus 1 AP

Aura Rosenberg, John Baldessari / Carmen

Aura Rosenberg

John Baldessari / Carmen

1996-98/ 2015

Archival pigment print on cotton

76 x 60 in / 193 x 152.4 cm

Edition of 1 plus 1 AP

Aura Rosenberg, Mike Kelley / Carmen

Aura Rosenberg

Mike Kelley / Carmen

1996 / 2015

Archival pigment print on cotton

76 x 60 in / 193 x 152.4 cm

Edition of 1 plus 1 AP

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?

Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present Who Am I?, What Am I?, Where Am I?,  a series of photo works by New York/Berlin based artist, Aura Rosenberg.

 

Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I? is an ongoing, series of collaborative portraits of children.  Currently, over eighty artists have taken part.  From these, Rosenberg selected five images, from collaborations with John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Sam Lewitt, Laurie Simmons, and Christopher Williams, to print as large-scale works.

 

The idea for the project came after Rosenberg brought face paints to her daughter’s kindergarten in Berlin.  Their teacher painted the children’s faces and Rosenberg photographed them, exhibiting the work at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien.  Rosenberg was aware that this popular childhood activity, as a staple of elementary school fairs and the like, would be considered a debased form of painting. This led her to invite other artists to make paintings on children’s faces to see whether this bias would still hold.   However, as Rosenberg states “of course, not everyone wanted to use paint and so the series became more diverse overall”, reflecting the collaborating artists’ individual practice.  These works became collaborations between the child, the artist and Rosenberg. 

As artist, writer and collaborator Nicolás Guagnini suggests, Rosenberg “is flirting with with a taboo: transgression in the family with our children…people instrumentalized by images: totem and taboo”.  The project included collaborations with artists such as Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Haim Steinbach, Lyle Ashton Harris, Louise Lawler, John Miller, Jim Shaw, and Marilyn Minter among many others.

 

For this exhibition, Rosenberg re-contextualizes the work by altering its scale.  The larger than life-size approach was inspired by Valentin Rothmaler, an artist curator who suggested that Rosenberg  hang her photographs as banners from the rafters at a church in Lübeck, Germany in 2014. As such, the portraits became more iconic.   

 

Aura Rosenberg’s work can be seen this autumn in the group exhibitions Sylvia Bataille at JOAN, Los Angeles, MOMMY at the Yale Union, Portland, Go Play with the Giant at the Villa Stuck, Munich and the School of Kyiv / Kiev Biennial, Kiev, Ukraine.  Recently her work has been exhibited at, among others, Casino Luxembourg, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Le Magasin; Centre D’art Contemporain, Grenoble, France, KW/Kunst-Werke, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art/ ICA, Philadelphia, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, and the Swiss Institute, New York.

 

A monograph on the project Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I? is available and is published by Hatje Cantz.