The works of Mika Rottenberg, which the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) is showing in a first exhibition in Quebec, offer a critique as pleasurable as it is uncomfortable of productivity and commodification, of hypercapitalism and globalization. .
His video installations show bodies and places which, from action to action, generate absurd and funny production chains. We do not really know, moreover, if the colorful protagonists of his works wish to escape from their endless merry-go-round. With seriousness inNoNoseKnows (Artist Variant) (2015), fetish artist Bunny Glamazon sneezes repeatedly, secreting pasta dishes while, below, real pearl farmers manipulate the molluscs.
A regular at events of international stature, with notable presences, among others at the Venice Biennale (2015) and at Skulptur Projekte in Münster (2017), the artist born in Buenos Aires (1976) who lives and works in New York is one of those very popular globetrotters. Mika Rottenberg rallies as much for the sharp intelligence of his works as for their seductive capacity.
He is therefore happy to see his work here in this exhibition which, however, the MAC – in collaboration in this project with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto – presents in a reduced format. The pandemic and the museum’s temporary move to Place Ville Marie got the better of the initial plans, with works no longer available and space becoming scarce.
Never mind the artist. “I compose with the space that I am given,” she told the To have to a few hours before the opening of his exhibition. She knows how to use space brilliantly, as evidenced by the itinerary of the exhibition, whose studied stripping benefits the reception of the videos which are exuberant, without dialogue or story.
Crossings of spaces
“I have trouble with monumental objects”, explains the one who prefers to film the material where it is found in profusion, in real and fictitious filming locations, a pearl factory or the gigantic market of Yiwu. Thus, in parallel with the videos, the sculptures of Rottenberg adopt rather a miniature scale, fragments of artificial bodies, such as a finger which stands in the wall and a mouth with red lips which opens, welcoming the gaze while close to the audience.
The mysterious character of the works — bodies treated as objects and vice versa — expresses a certain filiation with surrealism, claimed by the artist. She calls her practice “social surrealism,” acknowledging her interest in a Marxist approach to materialism. Curator Lesley Johnstone, head of exhibitions at the MAC, approaches her work from the point of view of “neo-materialism” whose theories lend matter a power to act. “By showing different interactions between bodies and machines, she also writes in the booklet, Rottenberg offers an allegory of the growing commodification of biological life. »
Depending on the situations depicted in the works, racialized women are the first concerned. While disturbing the recognition of places, the artist indeed geographically situates the inequalities observed, for example in Asia and on the border between Mexico and the United States in Cosmic Generator (2017).
Through a few fragments of scenery cleverly integrated into the exhibition, the artist symbolically makes us travel very far. A curtain of junk accentuates our physical journey to an elsewhere which, although improbable, suddenly proves to be more connected to our existence. The same goes for this space where the pearls are stored, as if the semi-basement that houses the MAC was already its hidden landmark.
maddening mess
The invisible connections, between people and things, have long inspired the artist who, to structure the maddening disorder of these unveiled networks, opts for geometric shapes. The hexagon characterizes Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), the most recent work in the expo, which links together images of throat singer Choduraa Tumat, the particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, and a strange RASM (Autonomous Sensory Response Meridian ), echoing the phenomenon popularized by YouTube in recent years.
The artist knows a thing or two about the auditory, visual and tactile stimuli that she has aroused in her works since the turn of the 2000s. She pushes the exercise to its climax in the video by staging gelatin molds with amusing properties whose colors betray artificiality. Until the masses fall onto the plate like fried eggs.
Nothing is trivial with Mika Rottenberg and at the same time yes, as it is about the objects that surround us and the gestures performed daily, on a chosen or imposed basis. Interpersonal communications, which the pandemic has made so precious with the enforced isolation, are at the heart of his next film, Remotea first narrative feature still in production that the MAC promises to present in the fall.