Mika Rottenberg. Capricious, dismal human signals

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (Goldsmiths CCA) opened at the very beginning of September. The former Victorian bathhouse and water tanks situated in the middle of the London university's South London campus have been respectfully converted by the London-based collective Assemble, Turner Prize winning architects in 2015, in order to reformulate a building with a spacious interior, encompassing seven/eight new gallery spaces. The building’s initial role of providing bathing facilities to the surrounding low income communities has now been transformed into a new 1,000 square metre centre, in the heart of New Cross itself. The first exhibition, which runs until 4 November celebrates the work of New York-based video and installation artist Mika Rottenberg.

Up on the top floor, in an eerily black chamber that once housed the water tanks for this former swimming pool, Rottenberg has arranged a number of hotplates on the floor, each heating up a frying pan. Water drips from the ceiling. It sizzles on the pans, sending up clouds of steam. In parallel, an air conditioner steadily drips water into a pot plant, a disembodied ponytail flicks out of the wall, while water keeps on trickling onto a series of searing, hot frying pans, fizzing and burbling. They’re all surreal economic non-sequiturs, constant feedback loops. They show the ceaselessness, the futility, the circular nature of selling, buying, using and discarding. Very different aesthetic landscapes from future shows including an Ivor Cutler retrospective, a presentation of work by the Chicago Imagists and the first large-scale showing of work by influential feminist photographer Alexis Hunter.
The new gallery will also host talks, performances, films and other events related to its wider exhibition programme. As a university gallery, the focus will be on a diverse programme of exhibition-making, from new commissions through to historical groups exhibitions. Through the gallery, Goldsmiths wants to inspire the next generation of contemporary artists and curators and will include creative learning programming as an integral part of its remit, including working with schools, young people, and communities in the Lewisham area and across London, and through regional partnerships.

Mika Rottenberg’s exhibition features two new films, co-commissioned with Kunsthaus Bregenz and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo); Untitled (Ceiling Projection) and Study#4, which examine the human body’s physical and psychological potential and limitations. Moreover, the women of Mary’s Cherries are professional wrestlers, while the office worker in NoNoseKnows is played by the fetish model Bunny Glamazon, who is over 1,80 cm tall. Elsewhere in the exhibition, motorised sculptures in the shape of various body parts turn and bounce, while sizzling frying pans emit plumes of smoke. Rottenberg, whose videos, sculptures and installations fill all three floors of the building, recently issued a statement of support for Justice for Cleaners. The artist felt a ‘personal responsibility’, she wrote, to address the campaign, particularly given the correspondence between its mission and that of her own artistic work: to expose the ‘hidden labour’ that is ‘embedded in everything we consume and produce’.

If all this serves to make Mika Rottenberg sound rather serious, or didactic, it shouldn’t. One film finds rows of Chinese women sorting pearls, in turn powering a wheel which puffs flower pollen at a woman with hay fever; every time she sneezes, she produces a plate of noodles. It’s a cycle of production for the sake of consumption where women are used and exploited. Again, it’s just economics, and it happens over and over in Rottenberg’s films here, whether it’s a woman hawking her wares along the US/Mexico border or female wrestlers forming a production line that turns fingernails into maraschino cherries. It all just repeats and repeats, consuming not to be consumed.