PCAI Collection artist Mika Rottenberg's

PCAI is glad to share that PCAI Collection Artist Mika Rottenberg, is having one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of her work to date at Museum Tinguely, under the title Antimatter Factory. The exhibition offers a survey of the diverse oeuvre of Mika Rottenberg (born 1976), an artist who has attracted international attention with works at the Venice Biennale (2015), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017) and Istanbul Biennale (2019). In surprising and playful ways, her videos reflect absurd situations shaped by the logic of capitalist production. With their painterly riots of colour, they address all of our senses, bridging the gap between continents and dimensions with ease and with tongue in cheek. As well as key video works and installations made between 2003 and 2024, the show includes her feature film REMOTE (2022). A specially made fountain sculpture in the park outside the museum will be unveiled and new, hybrid sculptures made of organic materials and reclaimed plastic will be presented. Kinetic works, some of them interactive, complete the overview that will be on display in Basel under the exhibition title Mika Rottenberg: Antimatter Factory from June 5 to November 3, 2024.

The exhibition takes its title from a research department at CERN in Geneva that conducts experiments into antimatter. Rottenberg’s time there as artist-in-residence provided the inspiration for her work Spaghetti Blockchain (2019-2024), which will be shown for the first time as a three-channel video installation during the exhibition. It addresses the exchange of energies, objects and people, combining the microscopic with the macroscopic and shifting matter through time and space as if by magic.

In overdrawn, absurdly surreal scenarios, Rottenberg’s art questions conditions of production and the value of labour in a Marxist sense, with a special focus on the situation of female workers. Playfully inverting cause and effect, she switches back and forth between the micro and the macro, creating an alchemy of energies and cosmologies. Viewers find themselves in a fantasy world of intoxicating sensuality and troubling illogicality that has a very liberating quality. Combining the real and the imaginary, these ecosystems of seduction and magic are marked by a physicality that is conceived of on an architectural scale: space and time, inside and outside, up and down, near and far, clean and dirty, smooth and rough. With her creative use of materials and her openness to alternative epistemologies via the agency of these materials, she anticipated developments in today’s New Materialism that explores complex links between technology, nature, and the environment.

Curator: Roland Wetzel
Curatorial Assistant: Tabea Panizzi

The exhibition Mika Rottenberg: Antimatter Factory was produced by Museum Tinguely in cooperation with Kunst Haus Wien and Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg.