CtC’s Artist of the Month for December is the visionary filmmaker Mika Rottenberg (Buenos Aires, 1976).
In her candy-coloured and paradoxical video pieces, Mika Rottenberg starts from a given fact and develops it into a total nonsense-ness. Diversely sized women, with often curious features, populate her surreal world, and work non-stop to produce commodities with their bodies in totally absurd ways – maraschino cherries obtained from nail tips, diverse ranges of pasta dishes sneezed out the nose. In these tableaux vivant, Rottenberg explores the politics of production and industry, as well as the exploitation of the female body. Her fictional factories are by no means a pure exercise of fantasy – yes they are in part, and they demonstrate how vivid it can be, but they also indirectly question fairness and work ethics. There is an ever present tension between what’s real and what’s not – real is both the premise and the final product – the invention is in how they’re being produced. Rottenberg’s videos also seem to lack a precise plot or even an end, however, it’s exactly by the voluntary omission of logical progression, replaced by an intentional looping around, that viewers are brought to associate the senseless situations in the videos with that of many we experiment or observe in real life.
For the month of November, CtC will present a selection of Mika Rottenberg’s works on the Facebook and Twitter pages.
Check the CtC pages regularly to see the next one.
Caterina Berardi
CuratingtheContemporary (CtC) 