Fine Arts Lecture Series: Mika Rottenberg, Thursday, April 21st, 5:30pm

The Penn Design Fine Arts Lecture Series is pleased to present a lecture by video installation artist, Mika Rottenberg. Rottenberg's latest work, "Squeeze" (2010), presents an uncommon and unsettling vision of art and commerce that is mirrored in the uncommon and potentially disorienting museum experience she creates for viewers. To reach the video, one must travel a mazelike installation. This physical passage offers a through-the-rabbit-hole journey into an alternate art space in which impossible and uncanny events transpire, serving as an architectural symbol of the absurdist approach with which Rottenberg produces serious commentary on current social conditions.

To create her short films, Rottenberg typically pursues an idea through drawings that give free rein to her imagination. Next she begins the careful casting process to find real people (instead of trained actors) who will interact with her mazelike, sculptural installation. She collaborates with a team of carpenters, engineers, and other assistants to build the environment or film set. Even before the construction is complete, she works with her characters in the space—almost as objects or motion studies—filming them and tailoring each compartment to fit their behaviours and unique corporeal features. Rottenberg makes feminist art decades after feminism was legibly defined. She makes seriously political art that is preposterously funny. She documents reality, but spins it into narrative fiction. With "Squeeze" (2010), Rottenberg hones these signature tactics, creating a video installation that is both humorous and unsettling.

Mika Rottenberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1976, and holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2000) and an MFA from Columbia University (2004). She lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; La Maison Rouge, Paris; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Her work has been exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; the Tate Modern, London; Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao and New York); The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Uncertain States of America: American Art in the Third Millenium (multiple venues, 2005-2006). In March 2011 she will have a monographic exhibition at de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam.

To learn more of Rottenberg's work, visit http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/arts/design/26galleries-MIKAROTTENBE_RVW.html

Event Date and Time: Thursday, April 21st, 5:30pm

Morgan Building
205 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
*Once you enter the building the lecture will be in the room immediately to your right.