PRESENTATION: Mika Rottenberg-Vibrant Matter

Mika 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…”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

“Vibrant Matter”, Mika Rottenberg’s first solo exhibition in Spain features the video installations, “Cosmic Generator” (2017) and “Spaghetti Blockchain” (2019), alongside her latest “Lampshares” (2024-25) carved from bittersweet vines and reclaimed plastic. 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’. The vines are carved by artist Max Bard, who takes into consideration the unique shapes of this odd squiggly wood, thus adding value to an otherwise ‘worthless’ timber. The carved vines are then pegged together using reclaimed plastic sticks and blobs made in-house; this process results in a playful, regenerative system of production that can be extended and combined ‘indefinitely’ without the use of screws or adhesives. The plastic has been collected from local dumpsters near the artist’s studio, mined and extracted as natural resources, while the forces of the extruder and gravity transform the plastic into 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. To create “Cosmic Generator” which premiered at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017, Rottenberg filmed in two locations at opposite ends of the earth: a Chinese restaurant in Mexicali, a border town between Mexico and California, and a wholesale market in Yiwu, China. She collapses notions of distance and time to consider how masses of plastic objects sold in the Yiwu Market circulate the globe freely and rapidly, while people and certain products face greater restrictions to crossing the US-Mexico border. As with many of Rottenberg’s works, the sequences of Cosmic Generator orbit one another, producing new connections. In “Spaghetti Blockchain” Rottenberg creates a kaleidoscopic apparatus in which energies and objects transport and transform across states of matter, weaving together images and sounds from myriad sources: Tuvan throat singers in Siberia, the CERN antimatter factory, a potato farm in Maine, and ASMR-inducing tabletop vignettes. As with many of her works, Rottenberg confuses interior and exterior, macro- and microscopic, right-side up and upside-down, self and other, prompting viewers to become more aware of their own bodies. The exhibition also brings together several of Rottenberg’s best-known kinetic works and videos, set within sculptural installations that expand on the videos’ narratives and intensify the disorienting aspects of her work.

Photo: Mika Rottenberg, Mm08, 2024, Graphite, acrylic, color pencil on paper, 69.1 x 99.9 cm / 27 1/4 x 39 3/8 in, 72.1 x 105.1 x 4.8 cm / 28 3/8 x 41 3/8 x 1 7/8 in (framed), Photo: Damian Griffiths, © Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Illa del Rei, Mahon, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, Duration: 10/5-26/10/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-16:00 (10 May-20 June and 7 Sept-26 Oct), 11:00-22:00 (23 June-6 Sept), www.hauserwirth.com/