Mika Rottenberg at Sprüth Magers, Berlin
Sprüth Magers, Berlin September 29–November 10
A pair of ample red lips curves to form a fleshy peephole. Behind it, a kaleidoscopic video shows buttocks, hair, and tongues squeezing through tight openings in a rambutan-textured wall. Entitled Lips (Study #3) (2016), this tiny video installation is the first work that visitors encounter upon entering Rottenberg’s exhibition “Bowls Balls Souls Holes.” In the adjoining exhibition space an antiquated air conditioning unit drips onto a rather forlorn-looking houseplant (AC and Plant Sculpture, 2018), while in Hair Machine (2014) a small motor repeatedly whips a scraggly braid against a simple white pillow. A rotating wall festooned with lumps of chewing gum and aluminum wrappers leads to the exhibition’s title work. This 28-minute video (Bowls Balls Souls Holes, 2014-18) links four surreal spaces that provide the setting for a series of repetitive and obsessive interactions between three isolated individuals. At the opening of the video, a lone woman lies on a mattress in a dank hotel room. Holding a vanity mirror in her hand, the woman catches reflections of the full moon through a hole in the ceiling. She appears to be conducting its energy – although it is not clear to what end – via swathes of tinfoil clipped to her toes with brightly colored clothespins. The next day at work, she listlessly pulls bingo numbers for a room full of women who busily stamp their cards, with the exception of a corpulent woman snoozing against a wall. At periodic intervals the sleeping woman wakes up, her ample flesh quivering as if animated by seething rage. Every so often the bingo caller drops a clothespin down a hole adjacent her desk. A Rube Goldbergesque sequence of chutes, holes, and springs propels the lonely bit of plastic through a series of empty spaces until a man catches the clip and affixes it to his face. This scene repeats until he has accumulated a plastic mane of clips, at which point he begins to spin in frantic circles until he spontaneously combusts and the clips reappear in an arctic landscape. Rottenberg’s darkly humorous, candy-colored depictions of monotonous labor and absurd, alienated routines can certainly be read as a form of anti-capitalist critique. Yet perhaps the most compelling aspect of Bowls Balls Souls Holes is how the triangle of bodies and lives that the video depicts resists normative structures and systems of valuation, generating a force field of tedium, boredom, malaise, and rage. The video’s interlocking series of spaces, processes, and routines therefore also begs the question of how such power can be wielded as a subterfuge. How might we siphon off the power of boredom, weirdness and refusal, in order to fuel parallel worlds?