SFMOMA (Venue Partner)
151 Third St.
415-357-4000
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Mika Rottenberg’s immersive video installations address issues of gender and labor through outrageous narratives centered around real women (not actors or models) and their bodies. With her New Work project entitled Squeeze (2010), Rottenberg collapses the humorous and the unsettling to examine global production. She shot documentary footage at a rubber plant in India and a lettuce farm in Arizona, then spliced in her own narrative of women in an absurdist make-up factory. The entwined images illustrate the fantastical mass production of an imagined art object: a lumpy cube made of rubber, lettuce, and blush. Through this surreal video, Rottenberg focuses on the very real nature of global factory work, honing in on the social realities of women’s labor. Ultimately, she questions the value accorded the artist and the art object in our culture, often positioned as the hierarchical opposites of factory workers and the products of their labor.
