Spaghetti Blockchain
Mika Rottenberg
Mar 19 – May 14, 2023
Every Sunday
12:00 – 18:00
Outernet Arts presents Spaghetti Blockchain, a new labyrinthine video piece by Mika Rottenberg.
Spaghetti Blockchain is a collage of imagery whirl-pooling through an over-stimulated thought-process. The viewer traverses through a universe of incongruous scenarios: footage of colourful ‘satisfying’ ASMR performances, Siberian Tuvan throat singers in open fields, the CERN antimatter factory, a mechanical harvester on an all-American potato farm, cut with dizzying rotating hexagons. The screens and space are filled with overwhelming colour, constant movement, ear-tickling effervescence and the deep singing tones. Calling back to Rottenberg's previous critiques of consumerism, in this exhibition the viewer finds themselves in a sensory equivalent of eating everything on the table until they can’t stand straight; simultaneously euphoric and queasy.
Rottenberg’s work often features performances of labour and production by women, noted to be read with a Marxist slant. She mimics the familiar imagery of American infomercials, creating absurd ‘solutions’ for non-existent problems, exposing the violence of consumerism in the 21st century, often at the expense of women.
"I was thinking about the deep psychological relations between the human body and the material world, as something that we produce, consume and are consumed by, like our relationship with microplastics for example. Spaghetti Blockchain can be seen as a factory for the production of sensory reactions in viewers' bodies, as a way to examine the toxicity I am attracted to and repulsed by, it’s also a cry for a better relationship between humans and the materials we produce and in return consumes us and our planet." - Mika Rottenberg
This exhibition is curated by Tony Tremlett and Ruth Waters. Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) was produced by the New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Arts at CERN, the arts program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations, Geneva; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, with the support of Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung.
Presented alongside Spaghetti Blockchain is From Here To Pluto, a digital installation by artist Grace Weir that refers to the constantly changing distances from Earth to the dwarf planet Pluto in our solar system.
Presented alongside Spaghetti Blockchain is also Supernova, a new film being shown for the first time by artist and film maker Pauline Julier.
About Mika Rottenberg
Born in Buenos Aires in 1976, Rottenberg spent her formative years in Israel then moved to the US. There, she earned her BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and followed this with an MFA at Columbia in 2004. Recent presentations include the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2022); the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark (2021); and ‘Easy Pieces,’ presented at the New Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto (2019 – 2020). Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.