Bank & Rau

Meat and Tools

Over time, millions of animals have been transported to Copenhagen’s Central Meat Market as living creatures, leaving it again as meat. In Karriere’s outside dining area, there are benches and tables decorated by the artist duo Bank & Rau in colours, which, as a counterpart to the surrounding functionalist architecture, are reminiscent of the long-gone gemütlichkeit of the welfare state’s infancy. The colours form a pattern which resembles the plastic parcels that were ubiquitous in the Central Meat Market, or the band pattern crisscrossing a notice-board showing shift rosters. Over the patterns, a variety of motifs are printed: a wire, a code scribbled on a slip of paper, a tie, a stiletto, a white and a black female breast, a knife, a white bone, a severed arm, a severed head, a butcher bowler and a scrap of paper bearing the word ‘Ouch!!’ We are given what look like clues to a crime, pieces in a game that it may be painful to play – painful for the girl in the stiletto heels walking along the pavement outside, the arm lopped off and the head separated from the body. In the city, we are all flesh and implements. (NH)

Lone Bank, born 1970, Denmark
Tanja Rau, born 1970, Denmark

• artwork