contemporary art

SFMOMA
July 09 – October 03, 2010

Mika Rottenberg’s immersive video installations address issues of gender and labor through outrageous narratives centered around real women (not actors or models) and their bodies. With her new video entitled Squeeze, Rottenberg collapses the humorous and the unsettling to examine global production in a 20-minute narrative that screens on a continuous loop at SFMOMA. Splicing together documentary footage from a rubber plant in India and a lettuce farm in Arizona with her own narrative of women in an absurdist makeup factory, Rottenberg’s surreal video homes in on the social realities of women’s labor.

In the makeup factory the blush source (the blond woman, dressed in an alluring outfit) is literally squeezed by walls for profit. Meanwhile, a nozzle from the wall of bare asses sprays water, and an obese woman spins on a circular floor — all to ensure that the priceless block of lettuce-rubber-blush is made to perfection.

“This piece, which is trying to collapse these geographically distant places into one space, is a natural step for me,” Rottenberg says. “It’s about using your body and being alienated from your body, objectifying your body and using it almost like a factory that can produce stuff. I feel like that’s very feminine. I’m interested in how selling one’s body can be empowering.”

Mika Rottenberg
Still: Squeeze, 2010