Exploring the Absurdity of Contemporaneity Through Mika Rottenberg’s Surrealistic and Humorous Art

Imagine a female Tuvan throat singer humming on the vast Siberian steppe, whose image is then replaced by a looping stream of multisensory footages of a surreal factory where marshmallow-like white substances are caramelized into vivid colors, and juicy rubbery tubes are gently sliced with overdubs of squelching, plopping and jiggling. This candy-ish material then melts to the floor of a laboratory chamber, forming a sizzling, bubbling puddle. A series of kindred scenarios then cut to the mechanical harvesting of a massive potato farm followed by documentary-style stills on the metal structures and overlapping wires of the Large Hadron Collider. Such absurd narratives and visually powerful sequences reminiscent of the atmospheres of Surrealism are at the core of Mika Rottenberg’s video opus Spaghetti Blockchain.

Spaghetti Blockchain

Shown publicly for the first time at the New Museum in New York, the twentyone-minute video work, called Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) is one of the latest creations of Argentine-Israeli video artist Mika Rottenberg, one that gives viewers a glance into strange but fascinating clashes of seemingly irreconcilable worlds. From these collisions emerges the allegory of the global networks and microbiological mechanisms we are all unseeingly bound by. The film mashes up colorful ASMR-style scenarios with seductive sounds, where objects and material are in continuous motion, mechanically nudged from one place to another.

The works of Rottenberg blend the absurd and the visually satisfying and probe the depths of bodily sensations, overlapping the borders between fiction and reality. The banal visual worlds of the artist have already traveled all over the globe, and today many of her works from the past 15 years, including videos, installations, and a series of kinetic sculptures are on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, while the artist is producing a new feature-length film set to premiere in March 2022.

Mika Rottenberg: personal escapes and expanding video

Mika Rottenberg is a truly global artist who lived and traveled around the world using her transnational identity as inspiration to dismantle cultural and social norms. Born in Buenos Aires in 1976, Rottenberg’s grandparents originally lived in Poland, but escaped from the country just before World War II and arrived in Argentina. During the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia) in Argentina, the family fled again to Israel in the late 1970s in search of peace. Rottenberg spent her formative years in Tel Aviv, then in the late 1990s she moved to New York City where she studied visual and fine arts at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia.

Rottenberg’s artistic career just began to take off at the beginning of the commercialization of the Internet. After graduation, she found herself scouting for talents online, making virtual connections with people who were ready to rent out part of their bodies for the artist’s early works like Tropical Breeze (2004) or Dough (2006). The characters that are cast in these films often inhabit an extraordinary body that they learned to gain confidence from and treat as a means of self-empowerment. A female bodybuilder or an unusually tall secretary were the first ones in a long list of atypical protagonists in Rottenberg’s universe.

Combining documentary and fictional narratives became a recurring feature of the artist’s films as well as her obsession with production processes and contemporary corporate supply chains. In Cheese (2008), the artist brings together these global concepts with the recreation of an inspirational story of seven long-haired sisters, who were the founders of a hair fertilizer company that made millions of dollars due to their unique appearance and marketing tours taking place two centuries ago. This historical story is eventually given a surreal angle, creating a film that depicts the sisters’ lives on the farm where they make a fortune out of manufacturing cheese from the milk of their extremely long hair.