Mika Rottenberg: SNEEZE

Tai Kwun Contemporary presents SNEEZE, a solo exhibition by Mika Rottenberg featuring video installations about surreal alternative worlds of global everyday life. This is the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong by the artist. With an engaging yet rigorous artistic practice combining film, architectural installation and sculpture, Mika Rottenberg is fascinated by processes of labour and of technology as well as the effects of distance and the production of value in our contemporary world. Her works bring to the fore some of the absurdities in our global world.

SNEEZE presents four works (Sneeze, NoNoseKnows, Cosmic Generator, and Spaghetti Blockchain) by Mika Rottenberg, whose practice focuses on material surfaces and transformations that are simultaneously stimulating and disturbing, bizarre and banal, beautiful and lethal, productive and also exploitative. More specifically, the artist seeks out locales and locations across the globe to cast a spotlight on specific systems of production, such as a pearl factory in the Mainland, or a Calexico border town—yet she does so in surreal ways. Referencing the traditions of both cinema and sculpture, the artist documents aspects of reality but also invents footage from studio-built sets in order to create elaborate and subversive visual narratives. By weaving fact and fiction together, she highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence, shedding light on connections, disconnections, and the complexity of exchange.

Presenter: Tai Kwun Contemporary

Curator: Tobias Berger

Artist bio
Mika Rottenberg, of Argentine and Israeli origins and currently based in New York, engages in an arresting yet rigorous artistic practice that combines film, installation, and sculpture. Her body of work has often dealt with production, commerce, and value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world. Referencing cinematic and sculptural practices, she makes connections between disparate objects and places; with a rigorous editing technique, the artist weaves elaborate and fantastical visual narratives that have a subversive edge.

Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognises artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. She has had a number of solo exhibitions around the world, including at New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; among others.