With the survey exhibition Antimatter Factory, KunstHausWien presents a comprehensive insight into Mika Rottenberg's multifaceted work, including her best-known films and installations from 2003 to 2022, a selection of kinetic, partly interactive sculptures with surreal functional and material compositions from 2020 to 2022 and her most recent group of works Lampshares from 2024, which combines natural organic structures with colorful lampshades made of recycled plastic.

The title of the exhibition, Antimatter Factory, quotes the name of a research department at CERN in Geneva that conducts experiments on antimatter. Rottenberg found inspiration there as artist in residence for her work Spaghetti Blockchain (2019-2024), which focuses on the exchange of energies, objects and people. Mika Rottenberg creates fantasy worlds of seductive sensuality and irritating logic. From a tongue-in-cheek Marxist perspective and with a focus on the human body, she examines capitalist production conditions and the value of labor. From a pearl farm to a Chinese wholesale market for cheap goods and the production of ready meals: Rottenberg's work uncovers the grotesque mechanisms of global supply chains, industrial manufacturing and profit-driven labor and shows the unscrupulous exploitation of people and resources. With absurdly disarming humor, the artist illuminates the increasing alienation in a hyper-capitalist world and reminds us of the urgency of leaving these structures.

Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Pete Mauney

Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Pete Mauney

The questioning of the boundaries between reality and imagination runs like a common thread through Rottenberg's cinematic installations. People and things seem to be in motion, space and time, past and future seem to mingle. The people in Rottenberg's films perform absurd activities: They sneeze steaks, rabbits, light bulbs or whole meals onto tables and plates; they wet hair, feet or butts; they sit amidst plastic goods or glittering garlands, waiting for customers. Rottenberg's multi-layered work can be understood as a mirror of our globalized times, "in which nothing disappears, but everything is accumulated as a result of frenetic archiving" (Nicolas Bourriaud, Radikant, 2009).
The exhibition is a cooperation with the Museum Tinguely in Basel and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg.

Mika Rottenberg (*1976) is a New York-based artist whose practice combines film, architectural installations and interactive kinetic objects to illustrate the absurdity of rampant commodity production in today's hyper-capitalist world. From pearl and food farming to the mass production of plastic items in China, Rottenberg humorously points to the urgency of conserving resources, consuming less and living more sustainably.
Mika Rottenberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1976 and grew up in Israel; she moved to the USA in 2000. She studied at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University in New York. Rottenberg was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2019 and the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2018. The artist's work has been presented internationally in a number of solo exhibitions in recent years, including at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2022), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2020), Sprengel Museum Hannover (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2019), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2018) and Palais de Tokyo (2016). Mika Rottenberg lives and works in New York.
February 27 to August 10, 2025
www.kunsthauswien.com

Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth