Pamela Rosenkranz. Attraction (Red and Blue).

Red, blue and clear plastic

In the summer of 2014, from 14 June to 26 July, Karma International in Zurich showed My Sexuality, an exhibition by Pamela Rosenkranz. At its centre was a work called Attraction (Red and Blue).

The gallery walls were wrapped from floor to ceiling in thin clear plastic sheeting. Eleven matte aluminium panels leaned against the walls. Daylight came in through large display windows facing the street. On the floor stood six projectors, three casting red light and three casting blue.

The projectors showed no images. Only colour. Red and blue washed over the plastic, the aluminium and the visitors, competing with the daylight from outside.

Heat carries the smell

The most important part of the work could not be seen. Heat from the projectors' fans pushed a synthetic pheromone through the room. Some accounts describe it as a pheromone imitating the smell of the civet, an animal whose scent gland was used in perfume for a very long time.

A projector is a tool for images. Here it became a tool for smell. The light is what visitors saw. The smell is what acted on them. Both travelled on the same current of warm air.

Visitors were not told in advance. They walked through the red and blue, looked at the panels and left. They may never have known what they had just breathed in.

In most works that use smell, the smell is what visitors are invited to notice. In Attraction it works in the background. It needs no name, no praise or complaint. It only needs to be in the air, long enough, close enough. That silence makes the work more unsettling than any strong odour.

The mouse and the smell of the hunter

The work points to a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. It reproduces inside cats. When it infects rodents, scientists have observed that the rodents lose their inborn fear of cat smell. They are even drawn to it. The mouse approaches its predator, and the parasite's life cycle closes.

It is a rare example of desire being steered from inside by another organism. The mouse does not choose to be attracted. Something else chooses for it.

Rosenkranz turns that question toward people. When we find a smell pleasant, a colour compelling, a body attractive, how much of it do we choose? How much has biology, chemistry or advertising chosen in advance?

Penta reads the red and blue as colours of advertising and signage, designed to pull the eye one way. Rosenkranz sets them beside a molecule designed to pull the nose one way. Eye and nose, both being led.

The body as material

Pamela Rosenkranz was born in 1979 in Switzerland and works in Zurich. Her work often passes through materials close to the body: skin tones, liquids, care products, smell. She asks where a human being ends and matter begins, and the answer is usually less clear than we assume.

The exhibition title, My Sexuality, sounds intimate. But what it contained was cool: plastic, aluminium, projectors, a synthetic molecule. Attraction was taken apart piece by piece, like a mechanism.

A year later Rosenkranz represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale with Our Product, a pool of liquid the colour of human skin. Attraction came before that work, smaller and quieter. It does not need to be looked at for long. It only needs the visitor to breathe.