Mika Rottenberg debuts in Spain with surreal take on production systems

Mika Rottenberg’s work explores the pure absurdities of our current world. Hers is a direct critique of the banalities of global capitalism and its entanglement with labor and production, told through a body of work that is at once familiar yet strange, moving between the real and the fictional to fascinating and powerful effect.

In her first Spanish solo outing, at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, the Argentinian-born New Yorker pairs the much celebrated video installations “Cosmic Generator” (2017) and “Spaghetti Blockchain” (2019) with the latest “Lampshares” series (2024/25), accompanied by drawings that stitch together the many loose ends of her thinking. The gallery’s setting, marooned on the tiny island of Illa del Rei reached by boat from the Mahón harbor, feels cut off from reality, and is an ideal stage for her looped, surreal narratives.

The show begins with “Lampshares,” a colorful body of work, positioned across the gallery floor and hanging from walls and ceiling. These are fantastical pieces, oddly human-like lamps that glow, literally, with toxic beauty. They are also a direct hit at the lack of environmental effort, in this case from the powers that be in New York public housing. Rottenberg collaborated with New York’s Inner City Green Team and craftsman Gary Dusek to use bittersweet vines—an invasive species choking her upstate farm and the surrounding forests—and fuse them with melted, reclaimed-plastic “urban gemstones,” as she coins them.

Having realized that the local public-housing complex lacked a recycling system, Rottenberg’s team worked with residents to sort their garbage, mining everyday waste (laundry-detergent bottles, milk jugs, water containers) for color. “My daughter and her friends helped with the plastic recycling for the prototypes, at the beginning, but soon I realized we needed a lot of garbage.” She jokingly refers to the lamps as “eco rococo” for their elaborate, curvaceous and strangely sexual, anthropomorphic designs.

The effort is equal parts social project and material experiment. “Lampshares” is accompanied by a series of drawings of loop fingerprints, disembodied limbs and sensuous tendrils, all of which are long-standing motifs in her work that nod to female labor. They look whimsical at first glance but up close these images, “made with a lot of mess and with fingerprints,” as she explains, expose the imperfections in our world that fuel Rottenberg’s wider critique.

“For me it’s not only about the environment, but the people, the labor. The thing that really excites me is the idea of green employment in New York City. The title refers to the action. When you buy one, you’re buying a share of this project. And it all gets fed back into buying more plastic.” The process, she admits, is “laborious, because they are modular parts,” but once those parts exist “then it can be super creative, almost like a painting.” Saying that, Rottenberg is under no illusion that her project will fix New York’s recycling dilemma—the studio-collective has processed three tons in almost two years— yet the gesture points toward an economy where trash gains renewed value instead of ending up in landfill. I’m oddly reminded of the writings of Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who in “You Are Here” speaks of turning “garbage into flowers”.

In her video work, Rottenberg has sought to expose the hidden labor behind mass produced goods, making visible the invisible. In “Cosmic Generator” we see tunnels from a Chinese plastic-goods market to the Mexico–California border, then ruptures into candy-colored back-lots where goods and people disappear through hidden portals. Filmed on location, her documentary style slips into magical realism, reminding us that global supply chains remain largely out of sight.

Elsewhere in “Spaghetti Blockchain” ASMR bubble-popping meets Siberian throat singing, CERN’s antimatter lab, a potato harvester grinding across a field. The title references blockchain technology, a system where data is continuously transferred and validated across a network of computers, free from central ownership, regulations or control. In a similar vein, Rottenberg layers image and sound into a constantly shifting stream of associations—a mesh of disparate sources that loop without resolution, as she probes the mechanics of production, commerce and power. She explains, “I am interested in these human-made systems where the starting point is to have no clue what is really going on and to try to impose a certain logic on things, and the madness of that.”

Taken together, Rottenberg’s works form an intense loop of images, sounds, materials and ideas, that demand both attention and response. On an island already removed from the mainland, her biomorphic, viscerally alive objects and disjointed films sharpen our sense that the world we inhabit—the one we consume daily—may be governed by rules we’re only partially allowed to see. And that, for one, is becoming increasingly difficult to digest—and dangerously so.

“Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter” is at Hauser & Wirth Menorca until October 26, 2025.

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