Rottenberg, Mika and John Kessler
Argentinian / American, 1976- / 1957- (active USA)
SEVEN, 2012
Mixed media with three channel video
Duration: 36:08"
Courtesey Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
COMMENTS
Rottenberg’s video installations feature bodies performing tasks that range from the extraordinary to the mundane: a woman painstakingly crossing a frozen lake balanced on her bare hands ( Julie, 2003); a bored cashier tapping her fingernails on the counter of a kitschy Chinese take-out restaurant (Time and a Half, 2003); a contortionist bending over backward until her head is between her feet and then exploding in a puff of dust (Fried Sweat, 2008); and a bodybuilder grunting and dripping sweat onto a hotplate, each drop of sweat evaporating with a fizz (Fried Sweat).
In other works, dancers, professional erotic wrestlers, and a group of women with fantastically long hair are put to work in inventive, surreal re-creations of the industrial assembly line. Critics often
underscore the motifs of labor and manufacture in Rottenberg’s videos, invoking Taylorism, the “sweatshop,” “a blue-collar work ethic,” and “the sense of claustrophobia induced by a dead-end job.”
Born in Argentina in 1976 and raised in Israel “by parents steeped in the country’s labour movement,” Mika Rottenberg has received widespread acclaim in magazines ranging from Artforum International to Elle. In 2004 - the year she graduated from Columbia University’s master of fine arts program - New York Times art critic Roberta Smith selected Rottenberg’s video installation Mary’s herries (2003) as “best of show” among the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s summer exhibitions. Since then, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, as well as in more than a dozen international
exhibitions.
- Hsuan L. Hsu, " Mika Rottenberg’s Productive Bodies," Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 25:2 (2010) 40-73
Artists Mika Rottenberg and Jon Kessler will collaborate to present SEVEN, a performance and installation that stretches from the urban landscape of New York to the savannahs of Africa. Mixing Kessler’s kinetic sculptures with Rottenberg’s absurdist videos, SEVEN will collapse film time and real time to create an intricate laboratory that channels body fluids and colors into a spectacle on the African savannah.
- "Mika Rottenberg and Jon Kessler: Seven," Nicole Klagsbrun, Web, 4 November 2011
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
BORN 1976, ARGENTINA
LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK
Mika Rottenberg highlights tensions between leisure and labor in her fantastical video works. Fried Sweat, filmed in an Egyptianthemed room in an American resort hotel, can only be viewed through a peephole. As such, it positions the viewer as a witness to a range of fetishes and obsessions, from the bodily extremes of a contortionist and a body builder to the exoticism of the hotel décor.
SEVEN (2011) was a collaborative work of Rottenberg and artist Jon Kessler, and began as a performance in a lab-like set in a New York City project space. The number “seven” of the title references the number of chakras (points of energy in the body) as well as the number of performers, each of whose sweat was collected and “sent” to Botswana through an intricate tubular system. The version on view here, SEVEN (Cecil) (2012), displays videos and objects from the performance as well as a photograph of one of the performers, Cecil. Like relics in a cabinet of curiosity, these objects suggest an alchemical process in which the exchange of labor becomes poignant spectacle.
Labour and Wait, 2013