In one of the vital complete exhibitions of her work thus far, “Mika Rottenberg. Antimatter Manufacturing unit” affords a survey of the various oeuvre of Mika Rottenberg (born 1976), an artist who has attracted worldwide consideration with works on the Venice Biennale (2015), Skulptur Projette Münster (2017) and Istanbul Biennale (2019). In shocking and playful methods, her movies replicate absurd conditions formed by the logic of capitalist manufacturing. With their painterly riots of color, they handle all of our senses, bridging the hole between continents and dimensions with ease and with tongue in cheek. In addition to key video works and installations made between 2003 and 2024, the present consists of her function movie REMOTE (2022). A specifically made fountain sculpture within the park exterior the museum will probably be unveiled and new, hybrid sculptures product of natural supplies and reclaimed plastic will probably be offered. Kinetic works, a few of them interactive, full the overview that will probably be on show in Basel beneath the exhibition title “Mika Rottenterg. Antimatter manufacturing facility.”

The exhibition takes its title from a analysis division at CERN in Geneva that conducts experiments into antimatter. Rottenberg’s time there as artist-in-residence supplied the inspiration for her work Spaghetti Blockchain (2019–24), which will probably be proven for the primary time as a three-channel video set up through the exhibition. It addresses the change of energies, objects and other people, combining the microscopic with the macroscopic and shifting matter by time and area as if by magic. Right here, the guests are already on the coronary heart of Rottenberg’s inventive universe.

Jean Tinguely’s sculptures, too, may very well be described as factories that produce antimatter, creating immaterial poetry moderately than saleable commodities, thus satirizing industrial manufacturing as an exploitative relationship between people and machines. In her ironic takes or the shocking, typically positively weird connections inside the world manufacturing system, Rottenberg pursues this identical matter. Along with her social surrealism, she creates parables of alienation that echo Karl Marx’s prognosis of “a devaluation of the human world in direct proportion to the rising worth of the world of issues.” What makes her critique of capitalist commodity manufacturing all of the extra related is its rising pace, the worldwide free stream of products (and never of individuals), and digitization that detaches issues from their representations. This hyperlinks to a different focus of Rottenberg’s artwork, regarding the company of objects and supplies and their inherent spirituality.

The exhibition presents a complete choice of Rottenberg’s video works and video installations. Guests are greeted by the sound of sneezing and the primary video work they see is Sneeze (2012). Sneezing options in a number of of the artist’s works, as does her fascination with the expansion of hair, fingernails and toenails as vegetative physique merchandise. These recurring themes create a thread operating by the present.

The video set up No Nostril Is aware of was made in 2015 for the Venice Biennial. It reveals the method of commercial pearl manufacturing at a manufacturing facility within the Chinese language metropolis of Zhuji, from the insertion of a international physique, which the oysters them coat with mother-of-pearl, by to harvesting and choice. This location is related through cogs and transmission belts with a office the place a lady is surrounded by bouquets of flowers that trigger her to sneeze pasta dishes, whereas her nostril will get longer and longer. The query of productiveness is caricatured right here as an allergic response that’s extremely private however that can also be past rational management.

The inspiration for Cheese (2008) got here from the story of the Seven Sutherland Sisters who carried out as singers round 1900 and whose super-length hair was used to advertise a commercially profitable hair tonic model. Labelled “The Fortunate Quantity 7” the bottles of tonic promised not simply improved hair progress but additionally luck. Rottenberg’s walk-in set up consists of a labyrinthine construction product of tough timber wherein the facility of lengthy hair combines with power from the mist at Niagara Falls to supply the hair tonic. Through a wood transmission contraption, a surreal hyperlink is created between this story and the manufacturing of goat’s cheese.

Getting into the video set up Cosmic Generator (2017), guests are taken or a journey by a system of slim tunnels lit by flickering colored lightbulbs. The shot begins in the midst of a plate with a Chinese language sample, accompanied by the form of music typically heard in Chinese language eating places, in addition to screeching car sounds and the fizzling {of electrical} quick circuits. The digicam then shifts to a effervescent ocean of smashed colored lightbulbs, merging seamlessly with a panning shot throughout a wholesale market in Yiwu, China. The visible exuberance of the gross sales cubicles outcomes from the specialization of those uniform constructions, every promoting both plastic garlands in each possible shade, or every kind of fairy lights, or flashing Christmas bushes, or vibrant plastic flowers. A distinction to this overflowing world of commodity fetishism is supplied by the saleswomen, who sit within the midst of their wares, nearly invisible. The movie was impressed by a go to to the border city of Mexicali, Mexico, that has a big Chinese language inhabitants and lots of equivalent Chinese language eating places. Earlier than the border fence was constructed, town was related to the neighbouring Californian metropolis of Calexico by a system of tunnels. The movie’s use of easy bounce cuts to bridge distances and dimensions might be learn as an allegory or the worldwide flows of the industrial world and the geographical confinement of individuals.

In addition to additional video works and installations like Time and a Half (2003), Fried Sweat (2008), Smoky Lips (2016–19), and Untitled Ceiiiny Projection (2018) that span a interval of just about twenty years, the exhibition reveals a choice of hybrid kinetic sculptures made between 2020 and 2022, a few of them interactive, with surreal combos of capabilities and supplies, in addition to a gaggle of lamp sculptures, proven right here for the primary time, that mix natural constructions with colored lampshades product of reclaimed plastic. In Solitude Park, a vibrant three-metre Mountain sculpture within the form of a foot has been made particularly for the exhibition.

All through the exhibition, the guests can watch the function movie REMOTE (2022) within the lecture corridor of the museum. Made by Rottenberg through the COVID19 pandemic as a joint challenge with filmmaker and author Mahyad Tousi, it’s based mostly or conversations they carried out through the lockdowns when digital communication media acquired a brand new significance. The movie tells a unbelievable story of a post-pandemic period the place bodily and digital interplay unexpectedly mix and distances are abolished.

In overdrawn, absurdly surreal situations, Rottenberg’s artwork questions situations of manufacturing and the worth of labour in a Marxist sense, with a particular concentrate on the state of affairs of feminine staff. Playfully inverting trigger and impact, she switches forwards and backwards between the micro and the macro, creating an alchemy of energies and cosmologies. viewers discover themselves in a fantasy world of intoxicating sensuality and troubling illogicality that ha s a really liberating high quality. Combining the actual and the imaginary, these ecosystems of seduction and magic are marked by a physicality that’s conceived of an architectural scale: area and time, inside and out of doors, up and down, close to and much, clear and soiled, clean and tough. Along with her inventive use of supplies, she anticipated developments in at the moment’s New Materialism that explores complicated hyperlinks between expertise, nature and atmosphere.

at Museum Tinguely, Basel
till NOvember 3, 2024