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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, Our Product
installation view at the Pavilion of Switzerland, Venice
photo by MARC ASEKHAME

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screen capture from Our Product, an e-book version of the publication, which accompanies the exhibition

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Entitled Our Product, the exhibition, created by PAMELA ROSENKRANZ for the Swiss Pavilion at this year’s 56th Art Biennale in Venice, is all about Carneam, Evoin, Gleen, Magmelia, Neoten, Rilin, Solood, Silicone, Evian, Viagra, Bionin, Necrion or Visorb among others. All these names which sound highly synthetic, correspond to substances used in everyday items like make-up, creams, medications or even food.

For Our Product, PAMELA ROSENKRANZ employed the knowledge mobilized by marketing strategies and brands who develop these substances in order to create an immersive installation with so-called organic components like light, colour, scent, sound, hormones as well as bacteria, which triggers the senses as well as the perception.

ROSENKRANZ isolates the large interior space with plastics, filling it with a monochrome liquid mass matching a standardised northern European skin-tone. This Eurocentric skin colour, reminiscent of the «carnate» used in Renaissance painting to render the visual qualities of human flesh, is employed in today’s advertising industry as a proven way to physically enhance attention. ROSENKRANZ contrasts this skin colour—the product of a natural history involving migration, exposure to the sun, and nutrition—with a verdant green coating the institutional mantle of the Swiss Pavilion. Whereas the artificial green light in the patio blurs the distinction between inside and outside, a special wall paint that is biologically attractive further dissolves the clean separation between culture and nature. Smells and sound penetrate the architecture. The synthetic sound of water, generated by an algorithm in real time, disseminates throughout the space, and a scent evoking the smell of fresh baby skin billows through the Pavilion. Invading all of our 2/3 senses, this installation appropriates immemorial aesthetic reflexes that both art and commercial culture rely on, but renders them cognitively disturbing. As in a placebo effect, it’s hard to know here whether our physiological responses are triggered by imagination alone or if the effects we’re experiencing are the hallucinatory product of our bodies and their natural/cultural histories. – press release

This tension between ‘synthetic’ and ‘natural’ is at the core of ROSENKRANZ‘s work which explores the elements, the concept of purity, the body, the emotions and other non-economic aspects of individual subject in relationship with contemporary ways of consumerism.

Our Product is on view at the Swiss Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia until November 22, 2015.

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