Mika Rottenberg

A new exhibition at Stockholm's Magasin 3 presents a series of works by video artist Mika Rottenberg, revealing an imaginative world full of surreal scenarios and claustrophobic settings.

Mika Rottenberg
In Stockholm's Magasin 3, a new exhibition presents works by video artist Mika Rottenberg, spanning from the early 2000s to today. Rottenberg’s video installations reveal an imaginative world full of surreal scenarios. Her films portray a compelling production line in which physical labor is transformed into commercial products. A visual and conceptual delight, her work takes us through a series of bizarre processes with a logic that is at once elusive and absurdly self-evident.
On top: Mika Rottenberg, video still from Mary’s Cherries, 2004. Above: Mika Rottenberg, video still from Squeeze, 2010

The workers in Rottenberg’s videos are often women who earn their living from their dis­tinctive physical features, such as extreme obesity, muscularity, height or unusually long nails or hair. In the claustrophobic settings she constructs, women engage in the production of maraschino cherries, dough, make-up and wet-wipes in the most astonishing ways.

 

"Mika Rottenberg has the rare ability to comment on contemporary life in a way that is visually alluring," states exhibition curator Tessa Praun. "Her work can be interpreted from a broad feminist perspective, as well as one that embraces modern body-image obsessions and a poetic application of Marx’ theories on labor. With her unique, lighthearted, and absurd narratives Mika Rottenberg creates art that is serious, thought-provoking and liberatingly funny.

Mika Rottenberg, still from Cheese, 2007
Rottenberg considers her artworks to be sculptures in which the moving image is just one of several components. Details from her films — lowered ceilings, confined spaces, boxes and walls coated in her emblematic plaster texture — extend into the exhibition space at Magasin 3, creating a specific context for each work.
Mika Rottenberg
Mika Rottenberg, Barbara from Mary's Cherries, 2004

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