Mika Rottenberg: Spaghetti Blockchain

by Arthur · March 9, 2023

Mika Rottenberg: Spaghetti Blockchain
19 March to 7 May 2023
Outernet Arts
Now building
Charing Cross Road
London

The New York based artist Mika Rottenberg will show her labyrinthine video work Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) in a new multi-channel format across the world’s largest cover screens for Outernet Arts on Tottenham Court Road. The installation will be free to the public, and will run every Sunday for 8 weeks from 19 March to 7 May 2023.

Rottenberg illustrates the absurdity of humanity’s widespread production, distribution and consumption of objects by juxtaposing existing industry with her own, often unexpected, production systems.” I think of objects in terms of the processes behind them and the idea that humanity is caught up in everything. around us. I want to make these processes more visual. If art has any power, it is in making things visible.” From pearl and food farming to the mass production of wholesale plastic goods sold in China, Rottenberg excavates the processes humans devise to create a sense of control.

Spaghetti Blockchain is a collage of images swirling together through an overstimulated thought process. The viewer walks through a mismatched universe: footage of colorful ‘satisfying’ ASMR performances, Siberian Tuvan 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 the room are filled with overwhelming colours, constant movement, ear-splitting fizz and the deep singing tones. Calling back to Rottenberg’s earlier critique of consumerism, in this exhibition the viewer finds themselves in the sensory equivalent of eating everything on the table until they can’t stand straight; simultaneously euphoric and restless. As told by LA Times: “You don’t watch a Mika Rottenberg video so much as absorb it through all your senses.”

“I thought about the deep psychological relationships between the human body and the material world, as something 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 the viewers’ bodies, as a way to examine the toxicity I am attracted to and repelled by, it is also a cry for a better relationship between humans and the materials we produce and in return consume us and our planet.” – Mika Rottenberg, 2023.

Rottenberg’s work often contains notions of work and production by women, known to be read with a Marxist slant. Emulating the familiar image of American infomercials, she creates absurd ‘solutions’ to non-existent problems, exposing the violence of consumerism in the 21st century, often at the expense of women.

This exhibition is curated by Tony Tremlett and Ruth Waters. Spaghetti Blockchain was produced by New museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Art at CERN, the art program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with support from the United States Permanent Mission to the United Nations, Geneva; The Sprengel Museum, Hannover, with the support of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung.

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