PRESENTATION: Mika Rottenberg-Spaghetti Blockchain

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: The CJM Archive

Mika Rottenberg’s exhibition “Spaghetti Blockchain” brings together Rottenberg’s most prominent video, installation, and sculptural works from the past decade. The exhibition includes Rottenberg’s three most recent immersive video installations” “NoNoseKnows” (2015), “Cosmic Generator” (2017), and “Spaghetti Blockchain” (2019), as well as a series of related kinetic and interactive sculptures. Rottenberg often uses the term “social surrealism” to describe her visionary approach to art making, implying that embracing the bizarre in her work serves to reveal just how disorienting aspects of contemporary reality often are. Each of Rottenberg’s primary video works is situated within a theatrical installation, featuring items as disparate as sacks of pearls, inflatable pool toys, and plastic flowers. In “Spaghetti Blockchain” (2019), 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. With her video work “Cosmic Generator” (2017) Rottenberg offers an analogy between migration issues and the large-scale production and circulation of goods — underscoring the illogical nature of a society that favors and facilitates the entry of cheap objects but restricts the movement of human beings. 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. “NoNoseKnows” (2015), 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. A selection of sculptural works that blur the line between humans, machines, and nature both complement and complicate the video narratives on view. With these works, Rottenberg explores the physical and metaphorical distance between human labor and mechanical production. Isolated bodily extremities like elaborately-manicured fingers comingle with gears, cranks, and live plants to create a Rube Goldberg-like array of delightfully futile mechanisms. Some appear automatic or almost sentient, while others require the labor of visitors to activate them, further immersing and implicating them in the process. Although the world has changed since many of these works were first created, the subjects they tackle have only become more relevant. Questions of labor and human connection explored in this exhibition have intensified and taken on uncanny new resonances in a world suspended between pandemic and endemic conditions. The circumstances of characters in the video works navigating extremely confined spaces like tunnels and overcrowded kiosks, or sneezing absurd objects into existence, feel all the more resonant as the world continues to process the impacts of forced isolation, notions of proximity and contagion, and the disruption to supply-chain systems. By creating immersive films and interactive sculptures, Rottenberg encourages visitors to engage physically with her works, urging us to think more deeply about the processes that surround us, and our role as workers, consumers, and participants in the global systems we often overlook.

Photo: Mika Rottenberg, Spaghetti Blockchain (video still), 2019. Produced by Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Arts at CERN, the arts program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations, Geneva; Sprengel Museum Hannover, with the support of Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung; and New Museum, New York. ©Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Info: Curator: Heidi Rabben, The CJM (The Contemporary Jewish Museum), 736 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 18/5-22/10/2023, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.thecjm.org/