Mika Rottenberg: Bowls Balls Souls Holes is Rottenberg’s (b. 1976) first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Conceived in relation to the Rose’s expansive Lois Foster Gallery, the exhibition offers a selective account of the thematic and formal interests that have structured Rottenberg’s development to date. In addition to Squeeze (2010) and Tsss (2013), the Rose will present Rottenberg’s newest video installation, Bowls Balls Souls Holes (2014), a major new work commissioned and funded in part by the museum.
Rottenberg uses the moving image as a device to relate impossibly disparate—and often highly eccentric—characters, places, and activities, collapsing the space between them to produce parallel worlds. The artist’s videos and the sculptural environments that contain them re-imagine space and time to bring fantastical narratives of production and consumption to life, and the resulting installations disorient and transport the viewer to a place where weird and wonderful production lines abide by their own hermetic, relentless logic. Rich in material eccentricity, marginal subjectivities, and narrative absurdity, Mika Rottenberg takes the world we share apart and returns it to us in a form that is as strange and foreign as it is deeply felt and resonant.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a monograph on the artist with essays by Christopher Bedford, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
