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Pamela Rosenkranz Our Product, 2015 installation at the Swiss Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale

“Carneam, Evoin, Gleen, Magmelia, Neoten, Rilin, Solood, and Visorb are like Aspirin, Acrylic, Methylene, Spandex, Silicone, and Titanium, both literally and metaphorically, the stuff that Pamela Rosenkranz’s work is made of. While we are not familiar with most of these materials, their omnipresence manifestly changes the physical as well as the psychic constitution of human beings. Yet it isn’t obvious how it does so. In her work for the Swiss Pavilion, Rosenkranz reflects on the human subject being something like a fluid, a serial association generated from synthetic materials. She confronts us with the implications of an engineered nature.

Rosenkranz’s exhibition transmutes the Pavilion of Switzerland into a body of a “local skin color”, which is fluid, smells, shines, sounds and moves. A pigment that originally emerged as the specific product of migration, sun-exposure, nutrition, and any number of other contingent factors is resynthesized as a stock formula, composed of unknown ingredients.”