Mika Rottenberg – exhibition and publication

Mika Rottenberg
“Dough cheese squeeze and tropical breeze. Video works 2003-2010″
12 March–8 May 2011

De Appel Boys’ School
Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat 59
New Entrance at the Ferdinand Bolstraat! (around the corner)
(tram 16 or 24, stop Stadhouderskade)
www.deappel.nl

Exceptional women, such as the powerful Heather Foster, the sizeable Queen Raqui (‘Her body Utterly Amazing, Her agility astounding’), and the super-tall erotic model ‘Bunny Glamazone’, become absurd characters who use their bodies as production machines in the colourful films by the New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg. This spring the films of Rottenberg (Buenos Aires, 1976), who lives and works in New York, receive their Dutch première in de Appel. Rottenberg transforms the spaces in de Appel Boys’School into a maze of interconnected viewing devices that showcase her work, ranging from the single-channel ‘Julie’ (2004) to her most recent project ‘Squeeze’ (2010).

The exhbition will travel in an adapted format to Museum M in Leuven (Belgium) and be on view from November 3 2011 till February 5, 2012.

The first major publication on Rottenberg’s work, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., in partnership with de Appel Arts Centre and in collaboration with Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery will provide the most comprehensive analysis of Rottenberg’s oeuvre to date, with previously unpublished archival material and new visual sequences designed in collaboration with Project Projects, New York. Co-edited by Ann Demeester and Edna van Duyn, it will include key texts from different perspectives by poet Efrat Mishori (Tel Aviv), Linda Williams (University of California Berkeley); Hsuan L. Hsu, (University of California, Davis) as well as new interviews between the artist and her hired performers, who advertise their extreme physiques on the internet.

Mika Rottenberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1976, and holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2000) and an MFA from Columbia University (2004). Solo exhibitions include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; La Maison Rouge, Paris; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Her work has been exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; the Tate Modern, London; Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao and New York); The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Uncertain States of America: American Art in the Third Millenium (multiple venues, 2005-2006). Her most recent work, “Squeeze,” premiered in the USA at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art in summer 2010 and in New York at Mary Boone Gallery in conjunction with Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in fall 2010. She lives and works in New York.

*Image above:
Courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery in collaboration with Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery.