This exhibition brings together videos, installations, and sculptures by the artist Mika Rottenberg (born in Argentina, lives and works in New York). Three video installations - NoNoseKnows (2015), Cosmic Generator (2017), and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) - form the core of the exhibition, along with unusual sculptural objects that resonate with the videos
In her video installations, Mika Rottenberg creates unusual relationships between bodies and machines as a way to scrutinize the realities of global capitalism, dominated by the rampant production, distribution, and consumption of objects. Rottenberg describes her work as “social surrealism” inspired by Marxism, which she poetically interprets through images that seem to skirt any narrative logic. This social surrealism is based on the principle that reality is more absurd than its representation. Her visually overwhelming, highly colourful works underline the interactions among labour, economics, and the production of value, and the ways in which our emotional relationships are increasingly monetized. Using seduction, humour, and subversion, Rottenberg weaves together fictionalized documentary elements that reflect the real-life conditions of global systems.
In these works, women perform physical tasks that evoke the human condition in a postmodern era: labourers produce goods inside strange factories using complex fabrication processes; store employees sit nearly smothered under piles of knick-knacks; factory line workers cultivate freshwater pearls under deplorable conditions. By presenting various interactions between bodies and machines, Rottenberg offers an allegory of the growing capitalization of biological life. By juxtaposing bodily output (sneezing, secreting, and so on) and manufactured products, her videos humorously and transgressively expose the racial, gendered, and geographic divisions that underlie global systems.
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17 окт 2024
