Mika Rottenberg
Excerpt from Tropical Breeze, 2004
Born in Buenos Aires in 1976, Mika Rottenberg grew up in Israel and lives in New York. Her video works are both surreal and poetic, critical and topical, blurring the perception of reality to the point of absurdity and bordering on the grotesque. About Tropical Breeze Rottenberg says, "Every product contains part of the lives of the people who were involved in its production. It is very basic, but I find it beautiful because I like the idea of measuring the value of something not by its 'use value' but by the processes that were in its making -- the amount of 'life' that was put into it."
Mika’s art “is replete with metaphor and allegory,” Minter says: Her actors are people she finds on the Internet who do one thing exceptionally well, whether it’s growing their hair to Rapunzel-esque lengths or making a living as fetish workers beloved for their corpulence. Mika’s art celebrates these actors and their work. Her protagonists transform their bodily excretions, via whimsical assembly-line processes, into consumable products. In one piece, red-lacquered fingernails become maraschino cherries. In another, a bodybuilder lets his sweat drip into a hot frying pan. If viewers find these scenarios repulsive, that’s not Mika’s intent—I feel pretty sure of it. She just has a clear, fresh, idiosyncratic vision of the world, and she’s faithfully carrying out that vision.
This work is the one that impressed me the most with this artist. In my opinion her work is influenced by Situationist International, changing the system of power in space through behavior. She organized a group of non-mainstream groups in society and designed a seemingly meaningless factory production line for them. In this assembly line, everyone is full of fighting spirit, and the space is full of meaning because of their work. The socially marginalized characters in this unreal space created by Rottenberg regain their rightful power, and in their fair interaction with the space and the installation, the power of the overall space is evenly distributed to each character in the story.
Squeeze, 2010
In her video NoNoseKnows, Mika Rottenberg brings the viewer in a pearl farm in Zhuji, China. In parallel, she transports them in a factory where meals are concocted. Understand the line between reality and fiction in this video interview with the artist and see the film installation in the 2017 Canadian Biennial until March 18, 2018 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clCeUDp7Kag&feature=emb_title
She focuses on the social rights of women of color and marginalized people, which is one of my main focuses. The narratives of her films often unfold with installations and surreal and metaphorical images, something I hope to learn from her and Shana Moulton's work.