Bunny Rogers’ conceptual practice draws upon deeply personal references to reflect on experiences of alienation and intimacy. Her intricate narrative worlds often center on “overlooked objects,” endowing modest everyday items with the presence of people and moments that have shaped her life. For Rogers, imagination is not secondary to “reality”, but a parallel structure through which experience is processed and reconfigured. Drawing on the pop-cultural landscape of the late 1990s and early 2000s, her multifaceted practice considers how notions of identity and belonging were reshaped at the moment when the virtual and the real began to overlap and intermingle in unprecedented ways.

In her fourth solo exhibition with Société, entitled My Original Friend, Rogers transforms the gallery into an immersive installation that spatializes the familiar iconography of video game quests. In this dark, strangely flattened environment of grey brick, pseudo-classical columns, and torch lighting, we encounter a series of self-portraits in the guise of Joan of Arc, an animated character from the short-lived MTV series Clone High. Joan functions as a mask or placeholder for the artist, allowing Rogers to remove herself from the image and displace autobiography into a mediated form. In each image, she holds a different key derived from drawings of actual keys belonging to people close to the artist.

Rendered as quest objects, these keys become charged relics. They carry the intimacy of their owners while operating within the symbolic logic of the game world. Rather than serving as simple emblems, they suggest access, withholding, and the fragile architectures of trust that structure attachment. Suspended between personal artifact and digital artefact, the keys bridge Rogers’ inner life and the visual language of virtual space. Through subtle shifts in gesture, the figures stage the relationship between key and lock as a psychological threshold—charged with violence and tenderness, reverence and protection.

Bunny Rogers (b. 1990, USA) is a visual artist, poet, and performer based in New York. Rogers has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at venues including Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; De 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg; and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. She has participated in group exhibitions at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Hangar Y, Paris; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; New Museum, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; OCAT Shanghai, Shanghai; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; LUMA Westbau, Zurich; The Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; The Jewish Museum, New York; Queens Museum, New York. She is the author of My Apologies Accepted and Cunny Poem Vol. 1 & 2.