MIKA ROTTENBERG

10 MAY – 26 OCTOBER 2025

For decades Mika Rottenberg has addressed our relationship with capitalist systems of production and labor, realising a labyrinth of disparate worlds through seductive multidimensional works. She draws attention to the absurdity of our global situation; harnessing imagery that’s simultaneously pleasurable and troubling, blurring facts with fiction, the natural from the artificial.

Rottenberg’s first solo exhibition in Spain will feature celebrated video installations, ‘Cosmic Generator’ (2017 – 2018) and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), alongside her latest ‘Lampshares’ (2025) carved from bittersweet vines and reclaimed plastic. ‘Cosmic Generator’ blurs the distinction between fantasy architecture and real space by collapsing the distance between seemingly disconnected locations – filmed on-site at a market for plastic goods in Yiwu, China and at the border between Mexico and California, alongside elements shot in studio and objects displaced within the installation itself. Similarly, in ‘Spaghetti Blockchain’ the viewer travels through a universe of incongruous scenarios that evoke a range of sensory reactions: footage of vibrant ASMR performances, Siberian Tuvan throat singers, the CERN antimatter factory and a mechanical harvester on a potato farm coalesce and meld.

In her exploration of humanity’s paradoxical attraction to toxicity, Rottenberg has reframed the artist studio as an incubator for the regenerative production of her ‘Lampshares’, beginning in 2023. Working alongside Inner City Green Team and Gary Dusek in New York, Rottenberg combines bittersweet vines that choke forests in Upstate New York with plastic that has been collected, mined and extracted as natural resources or ‘urban gemstones.' Imbued with new meaning through regenerative systems of creation, the functional sculptures transform otherwise toxic and invasive materials. Interconnected themes of appropriation, distortion and reinvention run through Rottenberg’s playful oeuvre, highlighting our endless difference but at the same time the network of commodities and actions that bind us.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an Education Lab that will take its starting point from the work of both Mika Rottenberg and Cindy Sherman, exploring a shared idea that identity is not static but evolves over time. Our understanding and reading of ourselves and others can be influenced by personal experiences and behaviours, as well as social expectations and influences. The Education Lab will encompass a range of events, performances and activities in collaboration with the Higher School of Dramatic Art of the Balearic Islands (ESADIB) and Trobades & Premis Mediterranis Albert Camus, which will inaugurate its 2025 edition on 9 May at Hauser & Wirth Menorca. The extended events and learning program will feature wider community partners throughout the season, with further details to be announced.

Lampshare

2024

Spaghetti Blockchain

2019

Cosmic Generator

2017

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