MARIE MUNK ^DK

At Roskilde, you can experience a huge, hyperrealistic placenta. Is it from a birth? Or does it still live and give life? And who or what does it give life to?

The oversized placenta has a fleshy appearance, and the synthetic material is only visible upon closer interaction with the placenta. The artwork PLACENTA is presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Bikuben Foundation.

In the encounter with Marie Munk's hyperrealistic sculpture, the imagination runs free. We know very well that we are facing dead, artificial material but we imagine a real organ with pulsating blood vessels and moist flesh. The work draws us into the borderland between the repulsive and the deeply intimate.

The placenta gives us oxygen and nutrients while we are being formed in our mother’s womb – a beautiful symbol of the body's wonderful ability to create new life. At the same time, the placenta has a nasty aspect to it. It looks alien when it is expelled from the body, and after birth it is transformed into an image of the distance and the awkward relationship many have to their own bodily nature.

Through her work, Marie Munk deals with the idea that people are connected through their shared experience of having a carnal body in a technological world. She thematises new forms of coexistence and invites the viewer into an interactive space where we can experience ourselves in relation to new artificial and organic life forms.

Marie Munk (b. 1988) lives and works in Copenhagen. She received her MA - Mixed Media from the Royal College of Art in London in 2016. Marie Munk is an interdisciplinary artist, working with sculpture, installation, video and performance.

Marie Munk is a part of the foundation's studio programme which focuses on artistic development.

Other artists in the studio programme are Jens Settergren and Linda Lamignan.

PLACENTA is supported by Danish Arts Foundation.