Country: USA, Mexico, China
Year: 2017
Duration: 27'
The installation examines the relationship between body, work, and productive processes. There is an old Asian store in Mexicali: on the surface it is full of lights, bright, colorful, kitsch, and overwhelming. Below it, though, there is an underground tunnel that reaches neighboring towns on the Mexican side of the border, all the way to Calexico in the United States. Bored clerks working at the counters surrounded by plastic objects, cold bright LEDs lighting the giant marketplace, the alienation of work affecting mind and body. Every wall, however, implies the existence of a tunnel and, thus, a way out. The fear of proximity and also the desire for contact.
Biography
film director
Mika Rottenberg
Mika Rottenberg (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1976) graduated from HaMidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Israel. Rottenberg moved to New York to continue her education, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2000, and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2004. Her video works feature women with physical eccentricities, such as being very tall, large-bodied, or muscular, performing physical acts that serve as an allegory for the human condition in post-modern times. Through film, architectural installation, and sculpture, her works deal with labor, the relationship between bodies and the environment, and fictional logic. She exposed her art worldwide, in galleries and museums such as Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art.
FILMOGRAFIA
Julie (cm, 2003), Time and a Half (cm, 2003), Tropical Breeze (cm, 2004), Mary’s Cherries (cm, 2004), Dough (cm, 2005-2006), Fried Sweat (cm, 2008), Cheese (cm, 2008), Squeeze (cm, 2010), Sneeze (cm, 2012), Cosmic Generator (cm, 2017).
Declaration
film director
A loose narrative that collapses geographies and stories such as: a row of Chinese restaurants in the U.S.-Mexico border-town of Mexicali; Yiwu market (a +1,000,000 sq. ft. ‘plastic commodities’ market in China); a 99 cent store in the border town of Calexico; and a street vendor with ties to other dimensions. [...] The film weaves documentary elements with fiction into complex allegories for human conditions and global systems.
Cast
& Credits
regia/director
Mika Rottenberg
**
contatti/contacts
Rosen Gallery
Andrew Kachel
a.kachel@rosengallery.com
www.rosengallery.com
Mika Rottenberg
**
contatti/contacts
Rosen Gallery
Andrew Kachel
a.kachel@rosengallery.com
www.rosengallery.com
