Pamela Rosenkranz (*1979) rose to prominence with a conceptual practice that encompasses sculpture, video, installation and painting. Her work questions the subjective element in the apprehension of an artwork, shifting the viewer’s focus toward the material, biochemical and neurological determinants of human behavior. Dubious of a worldview that places human beings at the center of the natural and material universe, the Zurich-based artist has also collaborated with thinkers from the broad philosophical movement known as speculative realism.
Pamela Rosenkranz, Pour Yourself, 2016
© Pamela Rosenkranz
© Pamela Rosenkranz
Siren Songs
Group Exhibition
Water as told by artists
Villa Medici, Rome
Through January 13, 2025
On the ground and in the atmosphere, as both an element and a resource, water constitutes us and overflows the world. Protean in form – rain, seas, droplets, dew, streams, clouds, fog, and tears – it is the essential source of all life. Diverted, extracted, and polluted, water has now become a vital issue in the ongoing ecological crisis. But although it has been conquered, the abyssal depths remain today more mysterious than the Moon, land of dreams, inhabited by fantastic monsters.
This exhibition follows the cycle of water, from sunken civilizations to ritual practices and the troubled waters of trade routes. The hybrid figure of the siren or mermaid, by turns malevolent and protective, half woman, half animal, acts as a guide to navigate between these worlds, from the depths to the surface. Her ambivalence resonates with that of water, a space of metamorphoses, between waters of rejuvenation and of doom.
