View of the exhibition “Slight Agitation 2/4: Pamela Rosenkranz”. Infection, 2016. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti.

MILAN.- Fondazione Prada is presenting “Slight Agitation 2/4: Pamela Rosenkranz”, the second iteration of a four-part project of newly commissioned, site-specific works hosted in sequence within the Cisterna, one of the pre-existing buildings at Fondazione Prada’s Milan venue. 

Curated by the Fondazione Prada Thought Council, whose current members are Shumon Basar, Cédric Libert, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Dieter Roelstraete, “Slight Agitation” continues with a second instalment by Pamela Rosenkranz (Switzerland, 1979). She follows on from Tobias Putrih (Slovenia, 1972), while Laura Lima (Brazil, 1971) and Gelitin, the Austrian collective active since 1993, will produce future chapters. 

The title of the project was inspired by the poetic expression “une légère agitation”, employed by the French historian Fernand Braudel to describe the tidal movement of the Mediterranean. This metaphor reflects the Thought Council’s starting point in presenting interventions by artists whose practices differ considerably in philosophical and material terms, all of them commissioned to interfere and dialogue with the spatial context of the Cisterna, and to influence the viewer’s physical experience and all her or his attendant senses through their works. 

Pamela Rosenkranz’s work explores how physical and biological processes affect art. Her forthcoming installation Infection is based on a neuro-active parasite, of which an estimated 30% of the world’s population is affected. 

A huge, almost sublime mountain of sand is formed inside the Cisterna’s tall spaces. Its scale pressuring against the historic architecture. The sand is impregnated with fragrance of synthetic cat pheromones that activates a specific, biologically determined attraction or repulsion and subconsciously influence the public’s movement. RGB green light illuminates the peak of this chemically altered nature gently evaporating the scent. 

Following Tobias Putrih’s instalment—which engaged with ideas of play, politics and emancipation—Pamela Rosenkranz’s chapter continues the Thought Council’s interest in “agitating” the mind and body, senses and space. Rosenkranz’s intervention will be perceived at different distances, which heighten and alter the architecture of the Cisterna. The circular plan, and chemical investigation, is an oblique memory of the Cisterna’s alcohol distilling vats that were formerly housed there. The green light leaking through the Cisterna’s windows, transforms the building into a vitrine, a luminous object sensed from the outside. It will intensify as day turns to night, engaging with the Fondazione’s nocturnal character.  

Members of the public have a direct, intimate experience of the sculptural intervention from a number of angles: at ground level and also from above, emphasizing the formal qualities of the Cisterna: its volume, its heaviness, its religious invocation. An uneasy feeling around biological determination will engage multiple senses: smell, heat and coldness, mass and density, light and its absence. Pamela Rosenkranz’s intervention furthers the ambitions of “Slight Agitation” by offering immersion into a new sensation of embodiment and collectivity.  

View of the exhibition “Slight Agitation 2/4: Pamela Rosenkranz”. Infection, 2016. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti.

Pamela Rosenkranz was born in Uri, Switzerland in 1979. She received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Bern, in 2004, and completed an independent residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2012. She recently received the Paul Boesch Award at Kunstmuseum Bern and will be displayed in forthcoming exhibitions at the ARoS Museum of Modern Art (Aarhus), the Boros Collection (Berlin), Sprüth Magers (Berlin), the K21 (Düsseldorf), and the GAMeC (Bergamo). 

In 2015, Rosenkranz represented Switzerland with the exhibition Ou r Product at the Swiss Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale. In 2013 her work was featured in the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. Rosenkranz’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Because They Try to Bor e Holes , took place at Miguel Abreu Gallery in 2012 and was followed by Anemine at the gallery in 2016. Other solo exhibitions include My Sexuality (Karma International, 2014), Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting, Reproduction (Kunsthalle Basel, 2012), Untouched by Man (Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2010), No Core (Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2012), Our Sun (Swiss Institute, Venice, 2009), and This Is Not My Color / The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , a two-person show with Nikolas Gambaroff, curated by Gianni Jetzer (Swiss Institute, New York, 2011).

View of the exhibition “Slight Agitation 2/4: Pamela Rosenkranz”. Infection, 2016. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. 

Recent group exhibitions include Wirikuta (Mexican Time - Slip) , curated by Nicolas Bourriaud (Museo Espacio, Aguascalientes), Art Unlimited (Basel), 13th Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach (Fellbach), Ich (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt), Inhuman (Fridericianum, Kassel), the 2014 Marrakech Biennale, Speculations on Anonymous Materials (Fridericianum, Kassel) Descartes’ Daughter (Swiss Institute, New York), EXPO1: New York (MoMA PS1, New York), Chat Jet: Painting the Medium (Künstlerhaus, Graz, Austria), the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, In the Holocene (The MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA), A Disagreeable Object (Sculpture Center, New York), When Attitudes Become Form (CCA Wattis, San Francisco), and Ghosts Before Breakfast (White Flag Project, St. Louis). Previously, her work was featured in New York to London and Back: the Medium of Contingency (Thomas Dane Gallery, London), as well as in exhibitions at institutions such as Kunsthalle Basel, Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunsthaus Glarus, and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (all in Switzerland), Tate Britain, Kunstverein Bregenz (Austria), and the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin). Amongst other public collections her work is held in the collections of MoMA New York, the Israel Museum, Kunsthaus Zurich, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Kunsthaus Bern, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. A monograph on her work, No Core , was published by JRP|Ringier in 2012 and the catalogue Our Product will be published in 2017.

View of the exhibition “Slight Agitation 2/4: Pamela Rosenkranz”. Infection, 2016. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti.