Mika Rottenberg

About

Featuring two new films, Rottenberg will respond to the building incorporating purpose-built installations alongside sculptural objects. Mika Rottenberg is known for her ability to highlight themes such as the inequalities of our global economy and the fragility of the human body, spun through a lens of humour, absurdity and confusion. She juxtaposes the vulnerabilities and strengths of her protagonists within uncanny interpretations of our physical world.

Rottenberg’s elaborate visual narratives draw on cinematic and sculptural traditions to forge a new language that uses cause and effect structures to explore labour and globalisation, economy and production of value, and how our own affective relationships are increasingly monetised. The artist explains that through film, architectural installation, and sculpture, she “designs systems with their own subjective logic, precarious systems that are constantly on the verge of collapsing, both logically and physically but somehow are able to hold themselves together through this motion of perpetual movement and growth, until they also pop…”

Two new works have been commissioned for the exhibition: Untitled (Ceiling Projection) and Study#4, which examine the human body’s physical and psychological potential and limitations. Rottenberg attempts to create a kind of psychological state, a spiritual state and a cosmic state, where energies transform things from one state of matter to another. There’s a crucial pivot point in these works, where they “become little solar systems or salad spinners, governed by their own perpetual centrifugal force”.