Mika Rottenberg: Sneeze to Squeeze

Magasin 3 is proud to present Mika Rottenberg’s first solo exhibition in Scandinavia. Rottenberg’s video installations reveal an imaginative world full of surreal scenarios in which mundane objects are produced through protracted processes that resemble factory assembly lines. The workers in Rottenberg’s videos are often women who earn their living from their dis- tinctive physical features, such as extreme obesity, muscularity, height or unusually long nails or hair. In the claustrophobic settings she constructs, women engage in the production of maraschino cherries, dough, make-up and wet-wipes in the most astonishing ways. Rottenberg’s main interest, however, is the process rather than the product. Her films portray a compelling production line in which physical labor is transformed into commercial products. A visual and conceptual delight, her work takes us through a series of bizarre processes with a logic that is at once elusive and absurdly self-evident.

“Mika Rottenberg has the rare ability to comment on contemporary life in a way that is visually alluring,” says exhibition curator Tessa Praun. “Her work can be interpreted from a broad feminist perspective, as well as one that embraces modern body-image obsessions and a poetic application of Marx’ theories on labor. With her unique, lighthearted, and absurd narratives Mika Rottenberg creates art that is serious, thought-provoking and liberatingly funny.”

Rottenberg considers her artworks to be sculptures in which the moving image is just one of several components. Details from her films – lowered ceilings, confined spaces, boxes and walls coated in her emblematic plaster texture – extend into the exhibition space, creating a specific context for each work. The exhibition will include works that span the last ten years. For the first time, she will present a group of purely object-based works and the installation Tsss.