Mika Rottenberg

23 June – 2 October 2022

Los Angeles

‘Mika Rottenberg’ is the first major presentation of artist Mika Rottenberg's work on the West Coast. The exhibition celebrates the global release of ‘Remote’ in late September: her first feature-length film, made in collaboration with filmmaker Mahyad Tousi. The artist’s first Los Angeles exhibition presents a survey of recent works in video, drawing, and sculpture that showcase the breadth and rigor of Rottenberg’s dynamic practice.

Explore the exhibition

Rottenberg illustrates the absurdity of humanity’s rampant production, distribution, and consumption of objects by juxtaposing existing industry with her own, often unexpected, manufacturing systems. ‘I think of objects in terms of the processes behind them and the idea that humankind is captured in everything around us. I want to make these processes more visual. If art has any power, it is in making things visible.’ From pearl and food cultivation to the mass-production of wholesale plastic items sold in China, Rottenberg excavates the processes humans invent to create a sense of control.

Cosmic Generator (Loaded #3)

Spaghetti Blockchain

2019

Sneeze

2012

‘Cosmic Generator’ (2017) investigates the idea that material is not static but is in constant transformation, while in contrast, humans are confined to the banal reshaping of material as a result of global capitalism. Filmed on site in Yiwu, China and at the border between Mexicali, Mexico and Calexico, California, the video installation collapses the distance between these seemingly disparate geographies – a phenomenon we experience more and more with the advent of new technologies.

Vv11

2020

Vv15

2020

Vv28

2020

Vv33

2020

Vv37

2020

Vv49

2022

The exhibition also includes a selection of drawings created over the course of the pandemic. Replete with a unique visual language – couplings of fingerprints, human limbs, palm trees – these drawings track the artist’s icons in a narrative fashion where they exponentially reproduce and ultimately vanish, evoking diagrams of chain reactions and biological systems.

Vv51

2022

Vv54

2022

Vv56

2022

Reminiscent of Rube Goldberg machines, Rottenberg’s kinetic sculptures are composed from recycled materials and sculptural elements that are arranged into machines. In some of the sculptures, human labor is necessary to activate motion – arms turn cranks and legs pedal wheels. With these sculptures, Rottenberg explores the physical (and metaphorical) distance between human labor and mechanical production, pointing to the futility of emoting energy to create a sense of control that results in something as irreverent and fruitless as a twirling pom-pom.

#33 with bamboo and bicycle

2020

#2 with Salad

2021

On view in Los Angeles

‘Mika Rottenberg’ is on view now through 2 October 2022 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

For more about the exhibition, download the full press release here.

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About the Artist

Mika Rottenberg

Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg is devoted to a rigorous practice that combines film, architectural installation, and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world.

Using traditions of both cinema and sculpture, she seeks out locations around the world where specific systems of production and commerce are in place, such as a pearl factory in China, and a Calexico border town. Through the editing process, and with footage from sets built in her studio, Rottenberg connects seemingly disparate places and things to create elaborate and subversive visual narratives. By weaving fact and fiction together, she highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence.

Each of Rottenberg’s video works is situated within a theatrical installation, made up of objects from the lush and bizarre parallel worlds in her videos. Sacks of pearls, deflated pool toys, plastic flowers and sizzling frying pans seem to open a portal into the realm of the work. Her multidimensional film projects are often accompanied by standalone sculptural works, connected by allegory.

Rottenberg’s latest feature length film, REMOTE (2022), co-created with Mahyad Tousi, was commissioned by Artangel, United Kingdom; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and premiered at Tate modern and the New York Film Festival in 2022.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1976, Rottenberg spent her formative years in Israel then moved to the US where she earned her BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and followed this with an MFA at Columbia in 2004.

Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.

Learn more about this artist