Consumer critique meets absurdist humor in the “social surrealist” works of the installation and video artist Mika Rottenberg.

Consumer critique meets absurdist humor in the “social surrealist” works of the installation and video artist Mika Rottenberg.

Born in Argentina, raised in Israel and now living in New York, Mika Rottenberg (born 1976) explores connections between people in the global consumer society through film, installation, sculpture and drawing. In Rottenberg’s work, people―most often women―and machines are engaged in incessant production. Rhythmic editing and sound design whirl us into labyrinthine processes in which goods are manufactured and conveyed in one big, surreal hamster wheel. Her scenarios are funhouse versions of our own world; like science labs investigating naturally occurring phenomena, the artist’s installations can be seen as designs and models testing social concepts and abstract systems. Rottenberg herself calls her art “social surrealism.”

This catalog, designed by the internationally acclaimed Dutch designer Irma Boom, presents some of Rottenberg’s most trenchant work, as well as an interview with the artist by Anders Kold, curator at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and an introduction by William Pym.