ART CITIES:N.York-Mika Rottenberg

Exploring the seduction, magic, and desperation of our hyper-capitalist, globally-connected reality, Mika Rottenberg’s elaborate visual narratives draw on cinematic and sculptural traditions to forge a new language, one that uses cause and effect structures to explore labor and globalization, economy and production of value, and how our own affective relationships are increasingly monetized.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Archive

Through film, architectural installation, and sculpture, her work illuminates an interconnectedness between seemingly unrelated economies; collapsing geographies and narratives, Mika Rottenberg weaves documentary elements with fiction into complex allegories for human conditions and global systems. Mika Rottenberg in “Easypieces”, her first solo Museum exhibition, premieres her new video installation, “Spaghetti Blockchain” (2019), alongside several of her recent video installations and kinetic sculptures. The exhibition its title from the book “Six Easy Pieces “(1994), in which theoretical physicist Richard Feynman introduces the fundamentals of physics to general audiences. Rottenberg’s exhibition likewise considers our relationship to the material world, while questioning human attempts to control or explain the inexplicable. Her investigations reveal the unseen connections between the basic or “easy” items that we manipulate and consume almost without thinking ”from luxury goods and plastic objects to emails, Bitcoin, and particle beams” and matters of the universe beyond our control. Employing absurdist satire to address critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings, manufacturing goods ranging from cultured pearls in “NoNoseKnows” (2015) to “Cosmic Generato”  (2017) with millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores. In “Spaghetti Blockchain” Rottenberg creates a kaleidoscopic apparatus in which energies and objects transport and transform across states of matter, weaving together images and sounds from myriad sources: Tuvan throat singers in Siberia, the CERN antimatter factory, a potato farm in Maine, and ASMR-inducing tabletop vignettes. As with many of her works, Rottenberg confuses interior and exterior, macro- and microscopic, right-side up and upside-down, self and other, prompting viewers to become more aware of their own bodies. The exhibition also brings together several of Rottenberg’s best-known kinetic works and videos, set within sculptural installations that expand on the videos’ narratives and intensify the disorienting aspects of her work. At the exhibition entrance, viewers encounter “AC and Plant” (2018), a sculpture comprising the back of an air conditioner that drips water onto a potted plant. A video installation viewed through a tiny aperture in “Lips (Study #3” (2016]), a whipping ponytail in “Ponytail (Orange” (2016]) and “Finger” (2018) a rotating fingernail painted with an image of the cosmos further activate the space. “NoNoseKnows” which premiered at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, investigates the peculiar process of cultured pearl manufacturing, in which oysters are deliberately infected to produce pearls. In this work fetish performer Bunny Glamazon sniffs small bouquets, provoking an allergic reaction: her eyes tear up, her nose grows, and her climactic sneeze produces plate after plate of noodles. Elsewhere, tables of women delicately cut and place an irritant into the shells of living oysters, while another team sorts pearls at lightning speed in a factory in Zhuji, China, a major hub for freshwater pearls. To create “Cosmic Generator” which premiered at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017, Rottenberg filmed in two locations at opposite ends of the earth: a Chinese restaurant in Mexicali, a border town between Mexico and California, and a wholesale market in Yiwu, China. She collapses notions of distance and time to consider how masses of plastic objects sold in the Yiwu Market circulate the globe freely and rapidly, while people and certain products face greater restrictions to crossing the US-Mexico border. As with many of Rottenberg’s works, the sequences of Cosmic Generator orbit one another, producing new connections.

Info: Curator: Margot Norton, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 26/6-15/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org/