Pamela Rosenkranz: House of Meme

How permeable are we, how absorbent? Pamela Rosenkranz perceives people as membranes. She favors trenchant means for her exhibitions. In the one at Kunsthaus Bregenz she is replying to the building’s architecture. While Peter Zumthor searches for phenomenological effects: light, sound, coolness, sensitivity, and the general disposition of individuals all playing a significant role, Pamela Rosenkranz questions the certainties of authentic experience. There is no such thing as pure experience or an immunity to invisible existences, which is something that has become abundantly clear during the pandemic. The human condition is modeled both osmotically and artificially.

The harmonious simplicity of the spaces within Kunsthaus Bregenz correlates with the ideas in the work of Pamela Rosenkranz. Such ephemeral elements as liquid, light, and sound, broken down into their rudimentary components, linked to one another, and recomposed, enable both the inaudible and the invisible to become apparent. The exhibition dissolves any separation between the natural and artificial. It becomes an animated “habitat” for a robotic creature that is controlled by our devices and which connects everything. Works of art as meandering objects recall rivers and serpentine forms alike. Screens of supernatural light appear throughout the building as architectural elements connecting the past and the future, manipulating the perception of what had previously been transformed from an idea into real place. Images in the form of artificial windows cast light, while fine mists structure the air and mix with the smell of fire and hormonal clouds of evaporated tears. The experience of art as biological reaction.

Kunsthaus Bregenz will be presenting Pamela Rosenkranz’s first solo exhibition in Austria. As Rosenkranz formulates her artistic vision as both sublime and as unsettling zones, her works are ideally suited, as spatially expansive and yet intimate experiences, to Kunsthaus Bregenz.

To complement the main exhibition, a new acquisition of a work by Lois Weinberger is being presented in the KUB Basement and in front of Kunsthaus Bregenz, works that likewise address nature, chemistry, and the environment.