Pamela Rosenkranz. She Has No Mouth.

A pool of pink sand

In April 2017 Pamela Rosenkranz opened her first solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, running from 29 April to 17 June. The show and its central installation shared a name: She Has No Mouth.

On the floor lay a large supply of pink sand, spread into a low pool like a blush. Many viewers thought at once of cat litter. Above, LED lights cast what the gallery called a high noon blue. The sound of a cat's meow played in the space.

And the sand gave off a smell. It carried civetone, a compound with a heavy musky odour. Sand, light, sound and smell made a room with no one in it, yet full of signs of an animal.

Civetone and the big cat

Civetone is a musky compound named after the civet, the animal it once came from. Today it is synthesised and used in household products and luxury perfumes. One of them is Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men.

According to the gallery, civetone is believed to influence the behaviour of cats. Obsession for Men is so potent that it is often used to draw large wild cats such as jaguars. A perfume sold to men for attracting people turns out to speak the language of a predator too.

Rosenkranz had touched this chain before in Infection, a work built on toxoplasma, a parasite passed from cats to humans that the gallery estimates infects around 30% of the world's population. In She Has No Mouth the focus shifts. She is not looking at what lives inside us. She is looking at how we and cats read each other, by image and by smell.

A character without a mouth

The title comes from Hello Kitty, the Japanese cartoon cat. Hello Kitty has no mouth. The usual explanation is that this lets consumers project their own private feelings onto her. She does not speak, so she can be whatever we want.

Rosenkranz reads this as a model of consumption. A blank face for us to fill in. A cute, pink, mass produced cat. The pink sand on the floor is a surface like that: soft, blank, silent. Yet it is not neutral. It gives off a smell that can steer an animal.

Alongside it hung the Pattern Tension paintings. Rosenkranz cut out photographs found through Google Images and covered them with layers of transparent skin toned acrylic, like a porous, three dimensional skin. The colours recall human skin and the sand and earth of sub Saharan Africa, where, as the gallery puts it, cats first hunted humans. Two Amazon Echo speakers were also shown, titled Conversation With A Cat and Prey.

Who is luring whom

Taken together, the room becomes an inverted trap. Long ago, big cats hunted our ancestors on sand coloured land. Now we keep cats indoors, buy litter for them, buy mouthless cat toys, and spray ourselves with a smell big cats recognise.

The line between hunter and prey blurs. We think we choose a smell because we like it. Rosenkranz suggests the smell may have chosen us, by routes far older than taste.

In 2022 She Has No Mouth was included in Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, an exhibition about life shared between species. There the pink pool sat among works by other artists looking at relations between living things. It was a reminder that relations between species do not happen only in laboratories. They happen in living rooms, in a perfume bottle, in a tray of sand.