Mika Rottenberg: Antimatter Factory

"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."
Mika Rottenberg

With the exhibition Antimatter Factory the KunstHausWien is presenting an extensive and varied insight into the multifaceted work of Mika Rottenberg, including her best-known films and installations from the years 2003 t0 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, Lampshares from 2024, which combines natural organic structures with coloured lampshades made of recycled plastic.

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. 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 scrupulous 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 imagination 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 absurd 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).

The exhibition is a cooperation with the Museum Tinguely in Basel and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg.

Biography
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.