“My work deals a lot with the appearance of colour and why it triggers something in us.” Pamela Rosenkranz comes from a conceptual background. Having worked mainly with black and white to create clarity in her practice, she realised that she was avoiding the complexity that colour could provide.
After a residency in Venice, Italy, she noticed heaps of water bottles from around the world floating in the canals: “I found it really fascinating to think who would actually have drunk the water and left their genetic traces in them.” Thus, she started the ongoing series of works called Firm Being, which consist of mineral water bottles filled the liquids in the colours of different skin tones. This simulates content that looks like a filling of yourself. “The idea of drinking water as something pure… I was very interested in contradicting this idea,” Rosenkranz explains and points out that most mineral water is in plastic bottles, which contain phthalates that can interact with the human body’s hormonal system. Her wish is to show the multitudes of an everyday object like a bottle: “I think, in the end, nothing is simple,” she says and concludes: “While we are drinking water we a somehow dying a bit too.”
In the work Anamazon (Into the Land) from 2017, the museum guest is met with a big pile of terra preta earth initially found in the Amazon rainforest. The bank is surrounded by artificial green, and blue light and the Alexa speaker was developed and sold by the American conglomerate Amazon. “It’s really interesting how economic organisms like Amazon are profiting from the idea of nature as a figure or a symbol,” Rosenkranz says. Creating an organisation that is as huge and powerful as the Amazon rainforest “is a very beautiful idea, but obviously, you can’t create a big commercial organism without somebody that pays for it.”
Rosenkranz wants the viewer to realise how much we rely on our instincts, even though we might not be aware of it: “We can learn to realise it. We can do that with our consciousness,” she says and continues: “Art can raise consciousness, and, in that sense, I want to create something beautiful but disturbing.”
