Mika Rottenberg

04.11.11 >< 26.02.12

Cheese, Squeeze and Tropical Breeze
Videoworks 2003-2010

Mika Rottenberg - Squeeze © Mika Rottenberg - Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery

Exceptional women, such as the powerful Heather Foster, the sizeable Queen Raqui 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 fall the films of Rottenberg (born in Buenos Aires in 1976, but now living in New York) receive their Belgian première in Leuven. Linking together often bizarre scenes, Rottenberg presents enigmatic working processes in which physical “waste materials” – such as blood, sweat and tears, or hair and nails – create new products, sometimes mixed up with salad or make-up.

Rottenberg is said to make “seriously political art that is preposterously funny”. In fact with her almost surrealist films she comments on existing ideas about a woman’s right to self-determination, the idealisation of the stereotype of the body and the position of workers in a globalised capitalist economy.

M exhibits about seven video installations by Rottenberg. This exhibition is a collaboration with De Appel in Amsterdam and Nottingham Contemporary and is a part of Playground, a collaboration between M and Arts Center STUK Leuven.

With the support of the Cultural service of the Embassy of Israel to Belgium.