Rose Salane

Rose Salane (USA, 1992) is an artist living and working in New York. In her practice, she places systems of value and exchange alongside feelings and loss to reflect on the conditions that shape life in cities. Her work was presented at the New Museum Triennial in 2021 and the Whitney Biennial in 2022 in New York. In 2022, she received a fellowship from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Rose Salane received her Master of Urban Planning from the Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

During her stay at Villa Medici, Rose Salane will observe two archaeological sites once occupied by the Roman Empire: Dura-Europos, in present-day Syria, and Pompeii. She will be interested in the perpetual resurgence of rings worn by the inhabitants of cities that have become inaccessible. Her current research highlights the ring as an object that is both familiar and sentimental, whose significance goes beyond its exchange value. Rose Salane uses objects salvaged from various contexts of loss to reflect transtemporal relationships to information, memory and preservation in ancient and contemporary cities. The artist will develop a project using rings in the Dura-Europos archives at Yale University, and will expand her research on rings in the archives of Pompeii’s archaeological park. This work will build on previous projects involving sets of lost rings, which the artist uses as a means of apprehending an individual’s dynamic identity within a city.