Mika Rottenberg’s Antimatter Factory at Museum Tinguely Basel

Mika Rottenberg, Spaghetti Blockchain (video still), 2019 © Mika Rottenberg Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

One of the most comprehensive shows of Rottenberg’s work to date, the exhibition takes its title from CERN’s unique facility in the world for producing and studying antimatter

Museum Tinguely offers a survey of Mika Rottenberg’s diverse oeuvre. Antimatter Factory spans video works, installations, and sculptures that playfully and subversively explore absurd situations shaped by the logic of capitalist production. Their vibrant, painterly riots of colour address all the senses, bridgingcontinents and dimensions with ease and tongue-in-cheek.

In 2018, Rottenberg visited CERN as a guest artist, where she explored her fascination with matter through the lens of particle physics research. Her interest lies in new materialisms, an interdisciplinary field focused on rethinking the material relationships between human and nonhuman entities, moving away from traditional dualisms in cultural theory. During her time at the Laboratory, Rottenberg filmed Spaghetti Blockchain, co-commissioned by Arts at CERN. The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from CERN’s Antimatter Factory, the world’s only facility for producing and studying antimatter.

Spaghetti Blockchain is presented for the first time as a three-channel video installation. It combines seemingly disparate worlds: insights into CERN experiments, female Tuvan throat singers, and a potato farm in Maine, interwoven with colourful, ASMR-style scenarios that are both pleasurable and unsettling. The film explores absurdist satire while acutely creating allegories for contemporary life: an exploration of labour, technology, distance, and matter about the seemingly immaterial. Through these film locations, Rottenberg experiments with humans’ ideas as composed of and as manipulators of matter.

Mika Rottenberg, Antimatter Factory, Museum Tinguely, Basel. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Zak Kelley

The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue that presents key themes in Rottenberg’s work via a playful navigation inspired by the artist’s aesthetics. It includes two insightful conversations between the artist and CERN scientists Gunn Khatri and Barbara Latacz. They discuss how physicists’ listen’ to antiparticles, the inspirations behind Rottenberg’s film Spaghetti Blockchain, and the unsolved questions of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter.