Pamela Rosenkranz

(* 1979 in Uri, Switzerland) lives and works in Zurich and Zug.

In 2004, she received a Master of Fine Arts from the Bern University of the Arts; she also studied Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich. She already gained international recognition during her studies.

Her most recent exhibitions include: Alien Culture, GAMeC Bergamo (2017), IF THE SNAKE, Okayama Art Summit, Okayama (2019), Là où les eaux se mêlent, 15th Biennale de Lyon (2019), Leaving the Echo Chamber, 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019) and Slight Agitation 2/4: Pamela Rosenkranz at the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2017).

Rosenkranz represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

She chooses striking means for her exhibitions. At the Kunsthaus Bregenz, she responds to its architecture. Peter Zumthor seeks phenomenological effects: Light, sound, coolness, sensitivity and feeling play a significant role. Pamela Rosenkranz scrutinises the reassurance of authentic experience. There is as little pure experience as there is immunity against invisible existences. This cannot be denied in times of a pandemic. Being human is osmotic and artificially modelled.

Light sources hang in the rooms like Gothic windows. At the front, they show colour surfaces in intense blue. They are not pictures in the usual sense, but rather glass windows of saturated light that have formed like sediments in the space of glass and concrete. Screens shimmer, giving depth. Blue is the colour of contemplation. We associate it with coolness, boundlessness, longing. In many religions, the colour blue is a symbol of ascension and redemption. But colours are also physical events. They are measurable lengths that are linked to the development of the sense of sight under water in prehistoric times. Rosenkranz pursues aesthetics as basic research into the sensual. She is thus closer to the experiments of the late Impressionists than Yves Klein, who painted mo- nochrome blue paintings and “reified” colour (Rosenkranz) when he had it patented.

What are colour and light? How do odours develop and how do their receptors behave? How are sound and vibrations registered? And can’t a building, like a living being, collect and retain experiences, such as temperature fluctuations, humidity levels and vibrations? Acoustic vibrations can dissipate, but not disappear. The same applies to neurological permeations and biochemical substances that are not degradable. Humans are no longer sovereign, but synthetic subjects. Rosenkranz hints at the intermingling of technical and natural substances through situations of obscurity. Foils shimmer, sound waves vibrate, humidity wafts and an archaic, artificially produced odour pervades the rooms. Everything flows, this age-old philosophical observation gains new relevance through the immigration of the artificial.

In the exhibition, the separation of nature and artificiality dissolves. It becomes the animated “living space” of a robotic creature that is controlled by our devices and connects everything. Its perception vibrates through the entire building. The signals from our mobile phones are already fed in when we encounter it. The movements of the snake in relation to our bodies, the contemplation of art or what is depicted as a need inherent to human beings from the depths of history, which also takes hold of us physically, runs through the exhibition. The house becomes the organism of an extended biological interplay.