Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
Through 26 October 2025
Lampshare (with plant 2)
2025
Milled reclaimed household plastic and plant
Lighting component: resin and electric hardware
40.6 x 35.6 x 30.5 cm / 16 x 14 x 12 in
© Mika Rottenberg
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Lampshare (bx 1.4)
2025
Milled reclaimed household plastic and plant
Lighting component: resin and electric hardware
91.4 x 83.8 x 86.4 cm / 36 x 33 x 34 in
© Mika Rottenberg
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Cosmic Generator (Loaded #2) (Video Still)
2017/2018
Single channel video installation, sound, color; 26:36 min
Dimensions variable
© Mika Rottenberg
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
For decades Mika Rottenberg has addressed our relationship with capitalist systems of production and labor, realizing a labyrinth of disparate worlds through seductive multidimensional works. She draws attention to the absurdity of our global situation, harnessing imagery that is simultaneously pleasurable and troubling, blurring facts with fiction, the natural with the artificial.
Mika Rottenberg’s first solo exhibition in Spain features the celebrated video installations, ‘Cosmic Generator’ (2017) and ‘Spaghetti Blockchain’ (2019), alongside her latest Lampshares (2024-2025), carved from bittersweet vines and reclaimed plastic. Perhaps the best introduction to Rottenberg’s oeuvre, the surreal and subversive ‘Cosmic Generator’ explores globalization, labor and spectacle, juxtaposing existing real-world industry with Rottenberg’s own, often unexpected, manufacturing systems. Mika Rottenberg illustrates the absurdity of humanity’s rampant production and consumption. The distinction between fantasy architecture and real space is blurred as Rottenberg collapses the distance between seemingly disconnected locations—filmed on-site at a market for plastic goods in Yiwu, China and at the border between Mexico and California—while mixing them with elements of magical realism shot in a studio and objects displaced within the installation itself.
Spaghetti Blockchain (Video Still)
2019
4k video installation with 7.1 surround sound,
color; 18:15 min
Dimensions variable
© Mika Rottenberg
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Similarly, in ‘Spaghetti Blockchain,’ the viewer travels through a universe of incongruous scenarios that evoke a range of sensory reactions: footage of vibrant ASMR performances, Siberian Tuvan throat singers, the CERN antimatter factory and a mechanical harvester on a potato farm coalesce and meld. Running throughout is a concern with how humans manipulate matter and their relationship with the material world. ‘I am interested in these human-made systems where the starting point is to have no clue what is really going on and to try to impose a certain logic on things, and the madness of that,’ Mika Rottenberg explains. The title refers to blockchain technology, which allows for data to be governed by its own perpetual movement within a cluster of computers rather than being owned or controlled by a single entity. Like a blockchain, Mika Rottenberg merges images and sounds to create fast-shifting connections between a diverse range of sources that weave themselves together with no resolution as the artist excavates and examines systems of production, commerce and control.
In her exploration of humanity’s paradoxical attraction to toxicity, Mika Rottenberg has reframed the artist studio as an incubator for the regenerative production of her Lampshares, a series of functional sculptures that she began in 2023. Working alongside Inner City Green Team and Gary Dusek in New York, Mika Rottenberg combines carved bittersweet vines that choke forests in Upstate New York with reclaimed plastic that has been mined and extracted as a natural resource and is now re-molded into ‘urban gemstones.’ The natural and the artificial blend together, with Rottenberg’s processing of the plastic recasting its smooth, shiny surfaces into imperfect, handmade-looking forms. Sharing the seductive but unsettling combination of lyricism and wit that characterizes the artist’s practice, the Lampshares bring the concerns with capitalist systems of production that Mika Rottenberg has previously animated primarily through metaphorical and conceptual works into the sculptural space. Imbued with new meaning and value through regenerative systems of creation, these otherwise toxic and invasive materials are transformed into unique lamps that propose a creative alternative to current, extractive systems of mass production and consumption.
Alongside the Lampshares, Mika Rottenberg presents a selection of recent drawings that echo the concerns of her film, installation and sculptural output through a unique vocabulary of recurring symbols and icons. Bodily features such as human limbs and fingerprints harmonize with the organic, oddly sexual forms of the Lampshares and gesture towards the concern with the non-normative women’s bodies and the role of female labor in Rottenberg’s film works. Allusions to circularity, meanwhile, parallel both the circular systems that organize her films and the focus on sustainable production methods. Running throughout Rottenberg’s playful oeuvre and its synthesis of absurd, disparate parts are interconnected themes of appropriation, distortion and reinvention, production, consumption and hyper-capitalism that highlight both our endless difference from one another and the network of commodities and actions that bind us together.
Artist Mika Rottenberg
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 production in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world. Her solo exhibition ‘Antimatter Factory’ is currently on view at Kunst Haus Wien, Austria until 10 August 2025, having traveled from the Musée Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland (2024). ‘Queer Ecology’ at Lehmbruck Museum, Germany is on view from 27 September 2025 – 22 February 2026. Other recent European solo presentations include the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark (2021) and the premiere of her first feature-length film ‘REMOTE’ (2022), co-created with Mahyad Tousi and commissioned by Artangel, United Kingdom; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, at Tate Modern, London in 2022. ‘Installations II: Video from the Guggenheim Collections’ was on view at Guggenheim Bilbao from 2009 – 2010. Mika 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 winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.
HAUSER & WIRTH MENORCA
Illa del Rei, Mahon, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain
Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter
Hauser & Wirth Menorca, 10 May – 26 October 2025
