VIENNA.- In Mika Rottenberg’s Antimatter Factory the world is full of absurdities: a finger protrudes out of a wall, people sneeze meals onto a table and plastic mushrooms grow out of logs. Born in Argentine in 1976, the artist, who grew up in Israel and today lives in New York, critically and humorously examines hyper-capitalism and its social and ecological consequences in her surreal, kaleidoscopic visual worlds. With this exhibition the KunstHausWien – a museum of Wien Holding – is responding to the urgent need to rethink resources, consume less and live in more sustainable ways, a line fully in keeping with its positioning as a museum devoted to art and ecology.
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Exhibition Concept
With the exhibition Antimatter Factory the KunstHausWien is presenting an extensive insight into the multifaceted work of Mika Rottenberg. The show features her best-known films and installations from the years 2003 to 2022, a selection of kinetic, in part interactive sculptures with surreal functional and material compositions from the years 2020 to 2022, as well as her most recent work group, the Lampshares from 2024. These works combine carved bittersweet vines and reclaimed plastic that Mika Rottenberg molds, extrudes and presses into sculptural forms.
Connecting Science and Art
The title of the exhibition, Antimatter Factory, refers to the name of a research department at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva which has been conducting experiments on antimatter. Mika Rottenberg partly filmed Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) at CERN, weaving together the complex processes of particle acceleration with seemingly mundane yet intricate human labor, with which the artist challenges perceptions of value, energy, and interconnected systems.
Mika Rottenberg creates worlds of fantasy which vibrate with a seductive sensuality and an irritating logic. From a Marxist perspective – which is very much tongue-in-cheek – and focusing on the human body, she examines the prevailing conditions of capitalist production and the value of labour. From a pearl farm to a large Chinese wholesale market specialising in cheap plastic goods and the production of ready-to-eat meals – Rottenberg’s works disclose the grotesque mechanisms of global supply chains, industrial manufacturing and work harnessed solely to profit, while showing up the ruthless exploitation of humans and resources. With a humour that is once absurdist and disarming, the artist illuminates our ever-increasing alienation in a hyper-capitalist world and reminds us of the urgent need to disengage from these structures.
Questioning the boundaries between reality and fiction runs like a golden thread through Mika Rottenberg’s film installations. People and things appear to be set in motion, while space and time, past and future blend into one another. The people in her films are involved in various activities: they sneeze steaks, rabbits, lightbulbs or even whole meals on tables and plates; they moisten hair, feet or buttocks; they sit amidst plastic goods or glittering garlands, waiting for customers. Rottenberg’s multifaceted work can be understood as a mirror reflecting our globalised age, an age “in which nothing disappears anymore and everything is amassed through frenetic archiving” (Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, 2009).
Capitalism, Production Processes and Human Labour
In his book Stoffwechselpolitik (2024), the sociologist Simon Schaupp has recently shifted focus onto the interaction between nature and working conditions: the more extensively nature is made utilizable, the more extreme its rebound effects on the working world. Here Schaupp draws on Karl Marx, who described work as “society’s metabolism with nature” – through work societies access and appropriate nature, changing it in the process, and generating waste products which then re-enter the cycle.
In Rottenberg’s work human labour is the motor of an unbridled growth that exploits both humans and nature. Her social surrealism offers a different way of looking at the complex metabolisms of our age. The works appear to be without any fixed spatial orientation points like above and below, inside and outside, and it is precisely this that enables them to capture the contradictory nature of the 21st century, characterised by global supply chains, digitalisation and ecological upheavals.
Gerlinde Riedl, Director KunstHausWien: “Social and ecological exploitation, overproduction and the wasting of resources: while resignation is on the rise throughout society in the face of all the global challenges, Mika Rottenberg takes on the most pressing issues of our age with a provocative wink. It is art like this that, by initiating a shift in perspective, bluntly shows us the hollow futility of global consumerism, while at the same time its absurdity and illogic has something extremely liberating about it.”
Sophie Haslinger and Barbara Horvath, curators: “Mika Rottenberg’s works are captivating due to their visual seductiveness and absurdist, disarming humour. Her film and sculptural installations invite viewers to enter a world where reality and fantasy melt together, while she illuminates the absurdities and complexities of capitalism, labour and globalisation.”
Mika Rottenberg about her work: “My work is about this magical and often exploitative process of producing ‘value’ through harnessing energies. Matter, especially plastic, has a lot of trapped energy in it.”
“I love thinking about materials and environments as sentient beings, as things we form relationships with.”
Born in Buenos Aires in 1976, Mika Rottenberg grew up in Israel before moving to the USA in 2000. There she studied at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University in New York. In 2019 Rottenberg was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize, in 2018 the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In recent years the artist’s work has been presented internationally in a series of solo exhibitions, amongst others at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2022), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2021), the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2020), the Sprengel Museum Hannover (2020), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2019), the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2018) and the Palais de Tokyo (2016). Mika Rottenberg lives and works in New York.
Curators: Sophie Haslinger and Barbara Horvath
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