Considered a leading figure in the contemporary art scene, artist Mika Rottenberg works in performance-based video-installation. Rottenberg hires women of eccentric and extreme physicalities via the Internet to work on her imagined production lines. Body parts or excretions, such as hair, fingernails, and sweat, from the women’s performance while working on the line are often integrated into the finished product. Examples of manufactured products are cherries, moist towelettes, dough, and cheese.
Rottenberg’s humorous and absurd factories are playgrounds for her to make highly political commentary. Combining Marxist commodity with Freudian sexuality, she investigates the construction of value, ownership, labor, and the body politic. Identifying as a feminist, she is concerned with “the way women’s labor has been marginalized and almost invisible throughout history.”
Currently working in Brooklyn, she received her MFA from Columbia University (2004) and BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2000). Prior to her higher education, Rottenberg grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel and was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1976). Since graduate school, she has shown her work nationally and internationally. Her work was showcased in the 2008 Whitney Biennale.
Rottenberg has had at least two solo exhibitions since 2004, her final year in graduate school. Her recent solo exhibitions have been held all over the world including, Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, NY (2014), Brandeis University in Waltham, MA (2014), The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel (2013), Magasin 3 in Stockholm, Sweden (2013), Galerie Laurent Godin in Paris, France (2012), FRAC Languedoc-Roussilon in Montpellier, France (2012), Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, England (2012), and Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel (2012).
Videos:
Tropical Breeze (excerpt), 2004
Installation View:
Mary’s Cherries, 2014
Cheese, 2008
Video Still
Installation View:
Bowls Balls Souls Holes, 2014
Rottenberg’s most recent work, Bowls Balls Souls Holes, was heralded by the New York Times. Writer for the publication, Ken Johnson stated that “[i]t’s a mind-stretching trip through time and space, from the action in a Harlem bingo parlor to the melting of ice in a polar sea and from a seedy urban hotel under a full moon to the subterranean depths of a parallel universe. Yet, at every moment, things are seen with a cinematic lucidity and with an eye for detail that makes the preposterous seem plausible and the mundane magical.”
Installation View:
Video Stills:
Links:
http://www.andrearosengallery.com/artists/mika-rottenberg/images#bowls-balls-souls-holes-2014
http://bombmagazine.org/article/3617/mika-rottenberg
http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_rottenberg
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/arts/design/mika-rottenberg-bowls-balls-souls-holes.html?_r=0
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