New Work: Mika Rottenberg

New Work: Mika Rottenberg

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

July 13, 2010

New Work:
Mika Rottenberg

July 9 – October 3, 2010

San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
(SFMOMA)

151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103-3107

www.sfmoma.org

Artist Mika Rottenberg debuts her latest immersive video installation for SFMOMA’s New Work series this summer in her first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast. Addressing feminist themes decades after feminism was legibly defined, Rottenberg makes seriously political art that is both preposterously funny and unsettling. She documents reality, but spins it into narrative fiction. With Squeeze (2010)—the artist’s highly anticipated next move following her standout piece at the 2008 Whitney Biennial—Rottenberg hones these signature tactics and pushes them to a new level of practice.

To create Squeeze, Rottenberg shot documentary footage at a rubber plant in India and at a lettuce farm in Arizona, then spliced in scenes of female workers in an absurdist makeup factory of her own imagining (actually a mechanized set constructed in the artist’s studio). The video installation entwines these sites to chart the mass production of an “art object”: a lumpy, subtly revolting cube made of rubber, decomposing lettuce, and blush. This “product” is a direct and self-reflexive riff on the prevailing value system of the contemporary art market, which positions artists and art objects as the hierarchical opposites of factory workers and the results of their labor. By setting her factory against the realities of mass production, Rottenberg broadens her focus beyond the art world.

New Work: Mika Rottenberg is on view through October 3, 2010, and is organized by SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Alison Gass, who was recently cited by The New York Times as one of nine young museum curators in the U.S. to watch.

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COMING THIS FALL AT SFMOMA

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera
October 30, 2010–April 17, 2011

When does the impulse to see become an urge to spy, and the desire to capture an image become a compulsion to penetrate another’s private world? Investigating the camera’s powerful voyeuristic capacity, this timely exhibition brings together historical and contemporary images by both unknown photographers and internationally renowned artists in order to examine the most unsettling uses of photography, including pornography, surveillance, stalking celebrity, and witnessing violence.

Conceived by SFMOMA Senior Curator of Photography Sandra S. Phillips; co-curated with Tate Curator of Photography Simon Baker

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How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now
November 20, 2010–April 17, 2011

The first exhibition of its kind, How Wine Became Modern looks at the contemporary culture of wine and the role architecture, design, and media have played in its transformation over the last three decades. Historical artifacts, architectural models, multimedia installations, newly commissioned artworks, and a “smell wall” provide a richly textured experience in the galleries, inviting you to discover wine as you’ve never seen it before.

Organized by Henry Urbach, SFMOMA’s Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design

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Media Contacts
Libby Garrison, 415.357.4177, lgarrison@sfmoma.org
Robyn Wise, 415.357.4172, rwise@sfmoma.org

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)