A film made in the artist’s studio 2012/13 and during the installation of the exhibition by its curator Tessa Praun.

Sneeze to Squeeze
Introduction

Legs stamping, hands kneading, muscles flexing, sweat dripping, tears running; there is pounding, groaning, sizzling and evaporating. Frantic and apparently ceaseless work is going on in Mika Rottenberg’s film installations. In surreal scenes, women are engaged in creating banal objects in protracted processes resembling factory assembly lines. The workers in Rottenberg’s videos are often played by women who earn their living on their distinctive physical features, such as extreme obesity, muscularity, height or unusually long nails or hair. These are women who feel confident in their bodies, and who are exceedingly self-aware. Mika Rottenberg sees them as “talents”, and works with them according to their specific physical attributes. In claustrophobic settings, her characters produce maraschino cherries, dough, make-up and wet-wipes in the most astonishing ways.

In the work Squeeze (2010), some sort of magical powers set the process in motion. The factory-like, narrow structure produces pink make-up and appears to be directly connected to a lettuce field somewhere on the North American continent, and to a rubber plantation in India. Different individuals and groups of female workers perform specific tasks. Their clothes and accessories are inspired by fast food chain waitresses and beauty salon technicians. As part of the machinery, bottoms, hands, tongues and lips protrude from the walls; they are dampened and scrupulously softened. The women are mutually dependent and part of a continuous cycle, where iceberg lettuce, rubber and make-up are mixed into a strange substance and finally molded into a cube of no obvious value. In Mika Rottenberg’s world, the women are neither enthusiastic nor particularly bored, but keep on working, repeating their tasks in a continuous flow. This is a visual and conceptual fireworks display, that takes us through strange processes with a logic as elusive as it is absurdly evident. The works are accompanied by distinct soundscapes that enhance the experience: Hard-working bodies in motion, drumming nails, whirring machines, trickling milk, we can almost feel the wind, the smell, the humidity, bodies swelling, bodies being squeezed. Rottenberg’s working process is often triggered by a particular sound or smell, a material or a texture. The characters, scenarios and production processes are then developed around these sensory perceptions, in a form of storyboard drawings, which are on view in poster format in the cafe at Magasin 3. The narrative further takes shape in collaboration with the actors, technicians and carpenters as they work together, creating the structures in which the films are shot. In these mini-factories, machines and humans become distinctly connected as the architecture and equipment adapts to the physical shape and ability of each individual. The elaborate film sets are alternately concrete and imaginative, and together with the production processes they become metaphors for the global consumerist system.

Mika Rottenberg sees her works as sculptures, where the moving image is one of several components. She uses details from the films, such as lowered ceilings, narrow spaces, cardboard boxes and walls covered in the by now for her emblematic plaster texture, and extend these into the exhibition space, thereby creating work specific settings. For the exhibition at Magasin 3, Mika Rottenberg has, for the first time, produced works that are solely object-based. The six sculptures on the lower floor appear to be wall sections torn from one of her film sets. Here the walls are covered in plaster applied in different ways to obtain a variety of rough surfaces. The sculptures are plastic casts of these surfaces in pale pink, yellow, grey and turquoise, and have, in the exhibition, been propped up against the wall. Mika Rottenberg reflects more often on what something feels like, than on what it looks like. With these sculptures, she activates senses other than seeing, as she brings us closer to a tactile experience. On the upper level she has added a site-specific set consisting of a wall structure and a rotating ceiling fan that is visible through a small opening in the wall. This is not a work in itself, but becomes part of the overreaching narrative. Her intention is to include us in her work, to make us aware of our own bodies in relation to the surroundings when we literally step into her world.

It is the production process in itself that is the primary target of Mika Rottenberg’s attention, and instead of focusing on the product, we see how the labor of our bodies can be transformed into physical objects. She complicates our perception of objects and their commercial potential, by letting the women produce trivial and apparently useless things. In Squeeze, moreover, she upgrades the end product, the cube of waste, into a work of art that is for sale. The ownership of the cube is divided into seven equal shares, which accompany the purchase of the film installation. Today, the cube is in safe storage on the Cayman Islands, as an object to be preserved eternally. It is beyond the reach even of its owners. By selling shares in an unattainable, unattractive and presumably perishable object, she is playing with established notions of what a work of art is or should be.

Mika Rottenberg has the rare ability to comment on prevailing social conditions in an evocative and visually seductive way. Quotidian aesthetics are imbued with new meaning as she shows us a prevailing production and consumer chain that is both familiar and intuitively disturbing, whilst also aiming a sharp blow at our contemporary warped body culture. The works can be interpreted in general from a broader feminist perspective that incorporates aspects such as the contemporary body fixation and a poetic approach to Marx’ theories on labor. With her unique, lighthearted, absurd narratives, Mika Rottenberg creates art that is both serious and thought-provoking, and also liberatingly funny.

Tessa Praun, Curator

Tsss, 2013
Air conditioner, plant, hotplate, frying pan, water
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York Drawing: Mika Rottenberg, November 2012

As part of the work Squeeze, an air conditioning unit has been fixed to the outer wall of the film screening room, with a plant placed on top. This unit stands as a reference to the machine in the film, used to cool the air of the factory-like structure that forms the hub of this extraordinary production process. Characteristic of Mika Rottenberg’s work is how she incorporates details from her films into the architectonic layout of the exhibition space, so as to enhance the experience.

Upon our approach to the work Squeeze, as it has been installed at Magasin 3, we hear a hissing noise. Tiny drops of condensed water drip from the unit into a sizzling frying pan: “tsss, tsss…tsss”. The drops hardly touch the frying pan before they skittle around and evaporate. In this way, for the exhibition in Stockholm, Mika Rottenberg has added a special twist to one of her installations, whilst also creating an entirely new work that may be shown separately.

Mika Rottenberg’s working process often begins with a certain fascination for a sound, a smell, or a taste. She wants to reach beyond the purely visual, and give form to our more abstract sensory perceptions. She builds her narratives around the often trivial experiences that we, through our bodies, only register subconsciously. Her interest in noises, tactility, bodily sensations, is also manifest in her choice of titles, which often rhyme with each other. The way we shape our lips and tongues to pronounce these words, how they feel in our mouths and how they sound – all this becomes part of the total experience when we visit Mika Rottenberg’s world of fantastical narratives.

Texture 1–6, 2013
Polyurethane resin, acrylic paint
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Image: One part of a sculpture pair. Photo: Jessica Eckert

For this exhibition at Magasin 3, Mika Rottenberg has created a group of six sculptures. This is the first time her work is purely object-based, and as the moving image is no longer an intrinsic part of the whole, this represents a new direction. The sculptures appear as if they have been torn from the walls of one of her film-sets, and simply propped up against the gallery wall. In reality, these are plastic casts of the kind of rough wall structures made out of plaster that often appear in her films.

Textures are key elements of all of Rottenberg’s films and installations. She responds to her environment with a stronger focus on the physicality of objects, than on their purely visual qualities. Experiencing her work often involves seeing and hearing the impact of one surface material upon another; the thud of a ball of soft dough against a flimsy piece of wood; the whirring of simple machinery; the squelch of ingredients in the process of becoming commercial products. Cheap aesthetics and the everyday are recurrent themes in Rottenberg’s work. As sculptural objects, these textures gain a new significance, even as they retain some of the associations of the low-end and makeshift. Rottenberg hones in on her perpetual fascination for how day-to-day textures are perceived, felt, ignored and lived with. As independent panels, these structures push beyond the boundary of the mundane and assert themselves as aesthetic objects. The democratic and the everyday – that which is seen to have no particular function beyond merely blending in – has been distinguished and made noteworthy.

Dough, 2005–2006
Single channel video installation
Duration 7 min.
Dimensions variable Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation e.v., Düsseldorf

Installed in a specially-designed viewing room made of low-grade plywood, the film Dough is reached by walking through an extended low-ceilinged corridor. The cheap makeshift aesthetic of this space is echoed in the film itself, where narrow rooms are connected via holes in the floors and walls, creating a sinister cross between highstreet beauty salon and sweatshop. In an elaborate process involving tears, air and pollen, the four uniformed women in this film use a primitive set of machinery designed to make dough rise. The dough is carefully kneaded and transported from chamber to chamber, and the final product eventually emerges as an unremarkable vacuum-packed lump.

Through the surreal and disconcerting production methods, and the discrepancy between the input effort and the output value, Dough elaborates on the complex relationship between the women themselves and the product they make. In the semi-industrial setting of this film, the lengths of dough handled by these women seem to take on the characteristics of their own flesh; something to be managed and tended, revered, controlled and pampered. The particular physiques of the women playing the factory workers begin to blend with the product itself, causing product and identity, production and result, to merge, destabilizing the meaning and value of labor. In Dough, the human physicality invested and contained in the process of labor and its structures, is being directly transported into the product, as intimate energies and fluids are excreted by the workers and transformed into a single saleable unit.

Fried Sweat, 2008
Single channel video installation
Duration 2 min.
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York Installation views, Nottingham Contemporary, 2012 Photo: Andy Keate

As the sound of Indian music – sarangi, drums and human groans – draws us towards a peephole in the gallery wall, the film Fried Sweat is glimpsed like a surreal, kaleidoscopic scenario unfolding in semi-secrecy. In a small, carpeted space reminiscent of an oriental parlor, a dreamlike assembly of odd characters is gathered to perform various seemingly significant acts: a bodybuilder flexes his muscles to produce sweat that drips into a frying pan and quickly evaporates; a body-contortionist bends into an impossible shape only to implode in a cloud of white dust; and a kneeling man simultaneously chops two planks of wood in half with his bare hands.

The performances that we witness through this peephole may seem like the stuff of “freak-shows” and fairground attractions, where audiences were drawn by the sensational abilities and physical attributes of the objectified other. But here, despite the bizarre setup, the power dynamic between watcher and “watched” is not so straightforward. As the scenario unfolds, it resembles a ritual in which the characters begin to generate an ephemeral energy that exudes directly from their bodies, to be harvested for some unknown yet significant purpose beyond our comprehension. The characters seem to share a significant secret from which we as onlookers are excluded.

Tropical Breeze, 2004
Single channel video installation
Duration 3:45 min.
Dimensions variable Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation e.v, Düsseldorf

In the work Tropical Breeze, lemon-scented moist tissues of the fictive brand Tropical Breeze, are being produced in a short assembly line made up of only two women. In the back of a truck, a woman seated on an exercise bike picks up a dry tissue with her toes, attaches it to a primitive pulley mechanism with a gum she is chewing, and transports the tissue towards the front of the truck. Here the driver, a heavily perspiring muscular woman, wipes sweat from her forehead onto the same tissue, and returns it to be packaged and branded. Surrounded by stacks of large boxes carrying the Tropical Breeze logo, the two women together engage in producing and delivering a product.

The excess of this production spills into the gallery space itself, where boxes of tissues are stacked high against the walls, and a wooden replica of an emptied shipping container serves as a viewing room for the film itself. The small assembly line shown in this film requires both women to multitask: driving, cycling, packing, delivering, as well as producing. Intimate ingredients such as their sweat and saliva go directly into the product. Their immediate surroundings – the breeze caused by the vehicle in motion and the Lemon Rush drink consumed by both workers – appear essential for the end product. We encounter on-screen pop-up ads as the truck moves along. In the artificial setup constructed in this film, production has become as fantastical as advertising, and the elaborate systems of making, moving, packing and distributing that constitute global commercial trading are both satirized and reflected upon.

Time and a Half, 2003
Single channel video
Duration 3:40 min.
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Time and a Half represents a mundane moment in a worker’s life that is both frozen and extended. In a Chinese restaurant, a waitress working overtime raps her long, painted fingernails on the counter. In the dead time between serving customers, where she is physically present but mentally absent, an otherworldly moment opens up. As if an unknown force descends on the scene, all sensory perception becomes exaggerated – both prolonged and slowed down. The wind from the table-top fan takes on the properties of a real breeze as the hair of the waitress lifts and moves, fanning out into an organic shape.

The highly contrived and artificial – the faux exoticism of the restaurant, the painted nails of the waitress and the artificial breeze of the fan, transforms into something supernatural. As the sound of her nails intensifies, the polystyrene plates begin to take off from their pile, one by one. Elements that appear remote and lifeless – a photo of a Chinese seascape, the palm trees painted on her nails – are brought closer and come alive. Time and a Half references the “ghosts” of another place, a place of origin that by degrees of removal has been rendered artificial. In the faux exoticism of the Chinese restaurant, the reality of labor, the hope, divisions and enforced roles that economic migration entails, are alluded to without being explicitly defined.

Julie, 2003
Single channel video
Duration 3:30 min.
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

The film Julie shows a young woman running through a snowy landscape wearing a sports outfit with an unusual bright-red helmet-like hat and an eye patch. The woman appears unfazed by the cold as she determinedly starts walking on her hands, the skin of her bare palms directly touching the frozen ground for what seems like a painful eternity. The woman walks not only on her hands, but also backwards.
Her actions exude a particular independence and joy. Through her assured vitality the snow becomes no longer a challenge to her bare hands, but their natural environment. As the camera turns with the woman, we move with her, upside down, so that our world becomes inverted. What is difficult looks easy, and what must be painful is achieved with ease and grace. The film portrays an almost exaggerated defiance, at once refreshing and recognizable as that universal kind of strength and determination needed to work against the grain of dominant systems and power structures.

Sneeze, 2012
Single channel video
Duration 3:02 min.
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Inspired by Thomas Edison’s motion study Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894), one of the first films ever made, the film Sneeze shows three men with exaggerated, sculpted noses who are seemingly unable to stop sneezing. As their sneezes intensify in strength, live rabbits and chunks of meat begin to appear, as if sneezed out of the men’s noses. Seated in a sparsely-furnished environment, the men seem to be under observation. The film focuses on the intense physicality of the sneeze, on how it builds up through bodily tension, and is finally released, only for the cycle of tension followed by release to begin again.

As the men expel animals, meat and light bulbs, they appear more than anything else to be embarrassed by their lack of control. Their comically over-sized noses and painted toenails appear incongruous with their business suits and their body hair. These men are presented as hapless victims of their own bodies. By showing vulnerability connected to the body itself and to its intimate processes, they enter a territory that has traditionally been ascribed to women. The scraping of nails against the floor, the loud sneezes and the thud of each rabbit or chunk of meat as it lands on the table – echo in our own bodies as we watch and listen. Just as these men are trapped within a cycle of compulsion, we get drawn into their struggle with the physical force and their lack of control over their bodies.

Squeeze, 2010
Single channel video installation and digital C-print
Duration 20 min.
Dimensions variable Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

In Squeeze, Rottenberg’s scenarios of manual labor expand for the first time into the realm of documentary filmmaking. The film is made on an iceberg lettuce farm in Arizona, USA, and on a rubber plantation in Kerala, India – as well as in a factory-like setting constructed by the artist. Here, Rottenberg makes a new logic-defying departure as the different parts of the world appear to be connected through mysterious holes in the ground. In visually engaging scenarios, locations that are culturally and geographically distant from each other are carefully woven together and directly linked through the categories of labor and production.

A large woman emits a mysterious energy that appears to fuel the entire process, as the literal squeezing of another woman results in the manufacture of pink make-up. Mixed with the mashed-up iceberg lettuce from Arizona and rubber from Kerala, it all gets compressed into an unsightly cube. Tongues, lips and bottoms protrude from different holes in the wall and are sprayed and attended to at regular intervals. The hands of faraway farm workers reach into the factory and are massaged by a team of Asian women. A service economy is being serviced, and as everyone comes to depend on each other, the film addresses the very human driving force that sustains our global economy.

Cheese, 2008
Multi-channel video installation
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation e.v., Düsseldorf

The work Cheese is loosely based on the true story of the seven Sutherland sisters, who, in New York in the late nineteenth century, manufactured and sold their own hair product, The Lucky Number 7 – Seven Sutherland Sisters’ Hair Grower. The sisters were known for their extremely long hair, which they claimed was a result of their own secret discovery. An article in Leisure Magazine of 1968, however, reveals that “the ladies presented a combined hair growth of 35 feet, 10 inches (almost 11 meters), attributed wholly to the ingredients of their miracle discovery, a secret later analyzed as alcohol, rainwater and food coloring”.

Taking the story of the business minded Sutherland sisters as her starting point; Mika Rottenberg has created an installation that consists of six projections housed within a wooden structure. In the fiction of the film, six longhaired sisters live together in a ramshackle barn where they make cheese, not just from the milk of the goats they keep, but also through various mysterious rituals involving their hair. The film shows the meticulous washing, grooming and styling of hair, a process so laborious that the sisters have to assist one another. In the strange, fairytale-like scenarios played out in this film, the women’s entire existence seems to revolve around the task of conjuring up supernatural powers to manufacture a single and unremarkable object for consumption – a perfectly ordinary block of cheese.

Dough, 2005 – 2006
Single channel video installation
Duration 7 min.
Dimensions variable
Julia Stoschek Foundation e.v., Düsseldorf

Fried Sweat, 2008
Single channel video installation
Duration 2 min.
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Tropical Breeze, 2004
Single channel video installation
Duration 3:45 min.
Dimensions variable
Julia Stoschek Foundation e.v, Düsseldorf

Time and a Half, 2003
Single channel video
Duration 3:40 min.
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Julie, 2003
Single channel video
Duration 3:30 min.
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Mary’s Cherries, 2004
Single channel video installation
Duration 5:50 min.
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Mary Boone with Cube, 2010
Digital C-print (part of Squeeze)
64 x 36 in. / 162.6 x 91.4 cm
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Squeeze, 2010
Single channel video installation
and digital C-print (see previous page)
Duration 20 min.
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Tsss, 2013
Air conditioner, plant, hotplate, frying pan, water
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Texture 1­6, 2013
Polyurethane resin, acylic paint
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Cheese, 2008
Multi-channel video installation
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation e.v., Düsseldorf

Sneeze, 2012
Single channel video
Duration 3:02 min.
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

“Flying Ponytail Matchbox”, 2013
special hand painted and signed edition of 25