Mika Rottenberg’s first solo exhibition in Spain features the celebrated video installations, ‘Cosmic Generator’ (2017) and ‘Spaghetti Blockchain’ (2019), alongside her latest Lampshares (2024-2025), carved from bittersweet vines and reclaimed plastic.
For decades Mika Rottenberg has addressed our relationship with capitalist systems of production and labor, realizing a labyrinth of disparate worlds through seductive multidimensional works. She draws attention to the absurdity of our global situation, harnessing imagery that is simultaneously pleasurable and troubling, blurring facts with fiction, the natural with the artificial.
LAMPSHARES
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The surreal and subversive ‘Cosmic Generator’ explores globalization, labor and spectacle, juxtaposing existing real-world industry with Rottenberg’s own, often unexpected, manufacturing systems. The distinction between fantasy architecture and real space is blurred as Rottenberg collapses 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—while mixing them with elements of magical realism shot in a 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. Running throughout is a concern with how humans manipulate matter and their relationship with the material world. Like a blockchain, Rottenberg merges images and sounds to create fast-shifting connections between a diverse range of sources that weave themselves together with no resolution as the artist excavates and examines systems of production, commerce and control.
‘I am interested in these human-made systems where the starting point is to have no clue what is really going on and to try to impose a certain logic on things, and the madness of that.’
MIKA ROTTENBERG
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, a series of functional sculptures that she began in 2023. Working alongside Inner City Green Team and Gary Dusek in New York, Rottenberg combines carved bittersweet vines that choke forests in Upstate New York with reclaimed plastic that has been mined and extracted as a natural resource and is now re-molded into ‘urban gemstones.’
Sharing the seductive but unsettling combination of lyricism and wit that characterizes the artist’s practice, the Lampshares bring the concerns with capitalist systems of production that Rottenberg has previously animated primarily through metaphorical and conceptual works into the sculptural space. Imbued with new meaning and value through regenerative systems of creation, these otherwise toxic and invasive materials are transformed into unique lamps that propose a creative alternative to current, extractive systems of mass production and consumption.
Alongside the Lampshares, Rottenberg presents a selection of recent drawings that echo the concerns of her film, installation and sculptural output through a unique vocabulary of recurring symbols and icons. Bodily features such as human limbs and fingerprints harmonize with the organic, oddly sexual forms of the Lampshares and gesture towards the concern with the non-normative women’s bodies and the role of female labor in Rottenberg’s film works.
Allusions to circularity, meanwhile, parallel both the circular systems that organize her films and the focus on sustainable production methods. Running throughout Rottenberg’s playful oeuvre and its synthesis of absurd, disparate parts are interconnected themes of appropriation, distortion and reinvention, production, consumption and hyper-capitalism that highlight both our endless difference from one another and the network of commodities and actions that bind us together.
Mm05, Mm06, Mm05
2024
Lampshare (P30)
2024
Lampshare (P30)
2024
Education Lab: Play your Part
‘Education Lab: Play your Part’ is an interactive space that takes its starting point from ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women ’ and ‘Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter.’ In collaboration with ESADIB, Escola Superior d’Art Dramàtic de les Illes Balears, we invited professor, Irene Pascual as producer and choreographer of the Lab.
Mika Rottenberg: Plastic
For the Ursula Material series, which examines artists’ transformations of raw materials, Mika Rottenberg takes us into her upstate New York studio, where she gives new meaning and shape to plastic, which she describes as ‘trapped ancient sunlight that cannot decompose and grow back into the system.’
On view in Menorca
‘Mika Rottenberg’ is on view now through 26 October 2025 at Hauser & Wirth Menorca.
À propos de l’artiste
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.
Current Exhibitions
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