Mika Rottenberg

Mika Rottenberg (born 1976) is a contemporary Argentine video artist who lives and works in New York City. Rottenberg is best known for her surreal video and installation work that often deals with the subject of female labor. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Mika Rottenberg was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976. She made aliyah to Israel with her family in 1977. In 1998, she graduated from HaMidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Israel. In 2000, 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. She is currently represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York.

Rottenberg's video works feature women with various 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. Her videos are inspired by stories where women have an unusual characteristic about their bodies that makes them a commodity, and specifically the women who advertise their unusual characteristic online to be utilized for hire. Some of the concepts her art deals with involve labor, body/environment relationships, and fictional logic.

Mary's Cherries (2004), which shows a woman's red fingernails being grown, clipped, and transformed into maraschino cherries, was influenced by a story about a woman with a rare blood type who quit her job to sell her blood. The women featured in Mary's Cherries are all wrestlers for hire. Cheese (2007) is a multi-channel video installation that depicts women with very long hair milking cows and making cheese using a machine powered by the movement of the women's hair. Rottenberg's work was showcased at the Whitney Biennial 2008.

Squeeze (2010) is a video shot on location at a lettuce farm in Arizona and a rubber plant in Kirala, India. Actors engage in a variety of gestures including thrusting a tongue through a stucco wall, a line of women massaging hands that protrude through a wall, and Bunny Glamazon being smashed between two mattresses.

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