Mika Rottenberg. Photo: Miro Kuzmanovic
Mika Rottenberg
PROJECT
Spaghetti Blockchain takes its name from an element within the video itself: a blockchain-like structure made of raw spaghetti, held together by nodes of marshmallows. The video threads together a diverse array of images and sounds, from Tuvan throat singing to the large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), to explore how energy and objects circulate and mutate across states of matter. Bodies, voices, energy, food, infrastructure and digital technologies are drawn into an associative field where matter circulates, transforms, vibrates and accumulates. From these improbable juxtapositions a vision of digital capitalism emerges not as an abstract system of exchange, but as a sticky, material condition inseparable from contemporary life.
ABOUT
Mika Rottenberg’s rigorous practice combines video, sculpture and architectural installation. Her work blurs the line between fiction and reality to highlight the absurdity of the contemporary, hyper-capitalist world and its social and ecological implications.
Born in Argentina and now living in New York, Rottenberg gained a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2000 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2004. She has held solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (US); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (Canada); Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (Italy); and the Museum Tinguely, Basel (Switzerland). Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (US); Louisiana Museum (Denmark); Tate, London (UK) and the Julia Stoschek Foundation (Germany).