Mika Rottenberg: Antimatter Factory

In Mika Rottenberg’s Antimatter Factory the world is full of absurdities: a finger protrudes out of a wall; people sneeze meals onto a table and plastic mushrooms grow out of logs. The artist critically and humorously examines hyper-capitalism and its social and ecological consequences in her surreal, kaleidoscopic visual worlds. With this exhibition the KunstHausWien, a museum devoted to art and ecology, is responding to the urgent need to rethink resources, consume less and live in more sustainable ways.

With Antimatter Factory the KunstHausWien is presenting an extensive insight into the multifaceted work of Mika Rottenberg. The exhibition presents her best-known films and installations from the years 2003 to 2022, a selection of kinetic sculptures from 2020 to 2022, some of them interactive, as well as her most recent series, Lampshares from 2024, which combines carved bittersweet vines and reclaimed plastic that Mika Rottenberg molds, extrudes and presses into sculptural forms.

The title of the exhibition, Antimatter Factory, refers to the name of a research department at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, which has been conducting experiments on antimatter. Mika Rottenberg partly filmed Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) at CERN, weaving together the complex processes of particle acceleration with seemingly mundane yet intricate human labor, with which the artist challenges perceptions of value, energy, and interconnected systems.

Questioning the boundaries between reality and fiction runs like a golden thread through Mika Rottenberg’s work. People and things appear to be set in motion, while space and time, past and future, seem to blend into one another. The people in her films are involved in various activities: they sneeze steaks, rabbits, light bulbs, or even whole meals on tables and plates; they moisten hair, feet, or buttocks; they sit amidst plastic goods or glittering garlands, waiting for customers. It feels as if Mika Rottenberg’s works were without any fixed spatial orientation points, such as above and below, inside and outside, and it is this that enables them to capture the contradictory nature of the twenty-first century, characterised by global supply chains, digitalisation, and ecological upheavals.

From a pearl farm to a wholesale market in East China specialising in small plastic articles, from the processing of instant meals to a factory producing antimatter—the artist uncovers in absurd and humorous narratives the connections between disparate locations, people, and resources, shedding light on our increasing alienation in a profit-oriented world.

Karl Marx described labour as “society’s metabolism with nature”: it is through work that societies access and appropriate nature, producing waste matter which then re-enters the cycle. In Mika Rottenberg’s practice, human labour is the motor of an unbridled growth that exploits both humans and nature. At the same time, the artist offers a different way of looking at the complex metabolisms of our age, which so urgently need transformation.

Mika Rottenberg, born 1976 in Buenos Aires, currently lives and works in New York.

Curators: Sophie Haslinger and Barbara Horvath

The exhibition Mika Rottenberg: Antimatter Factory is a cooperation of the KunstHausWien with the Museum Tinguely in Basel and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg.

Supported by Hauser & Wirth.

The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue that through a playful navigation based on the artist’s aesthetics presents the pivotal themes of her work. It features excerpts from video works as well as texts by Chen Qiufan, Heather Davis, Hsuan L. Hsu, Gunn Khatri, Barbara Latacz, Filipa Ramos, James Taylor-Foster, Mahyad Tousi, Mika Rottenberg and Roland Wetzel.

mikarottenberg-antimatterfactory.com