Talk

BFA Fine Arts presents a lecture with artist Mika Rottenberg (BFA 2001 Fine Arts).

Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg is devoted to a rigorous practice that combines film, architectural installation, and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world.

Using traditions of both cinema and sculpture, she seeks out locations around the world where specific systems of production and commerce are in place, such as a pearl factory in China, and a Calexico border town. Through the editing process, and with footage from sets built in her studio, Rottenberg connects seemingly disparate places and things to create elaborate and subversive visual narratives. By weaving fact and fiction together, she highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence.

Each of Rottenberg’s video works is situated within a theatrical installation, made up of objects from the parallel worlds in her videos. Sacks of pearls, deflated pool toys, plastic flowers and sizzling frying pans seem to open a portal into the realm of the work. Her multidimensional film projects are often accompanied by standalone sculptural works, connected by allegory.

Rottenberg’s most recent body of work, “Lampshares” (2023–present), is a ‘mini circular economy’ that produces functional sculptures made from invasive vines and reclaimed plastic. The artist and her team collects, molds, extrudes and presses New York City street waste plastic and bittersweet vines from New York forests into sculptural and functional form—suggesting the artist’s studio can be an incubator for a restorative circle of creation and consumption.

Rottenberg’s latest feature length film, Remote (2022), co-created with Mahyad Tousi, was commissioned by Artangel, United Kingdom; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and premiered at Tate Modern and the New York Film Festival in 2022.

Rottenberg earned her BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and followed this with an MFA at Columbia in 2004. Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.

Rottenberg’s work is held in numerous major museum and public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Venice Biennale (2015); and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. She has had solo exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.