Nottingham Contemporary

The first major UK exhibition of Mika Rottenberg’s arresting and comically disturbing video works will be shown in three of our four galleries. Visitors will view them in specially created installations which create conditions as claustrophobic and absurd as those endured by the women workers she portrays.

Her videos explore labour – particularly repetitive women’s work. Her glamorous and oddly erotic workers are squeezed into sweatshops – often literally. Bodily fluids are sometimes part of the production process, where lo-fi machinery and Heath Robinson-like contraptions produce uncertain goods.

Rottenberg’s work plays with the manufactured aesthetic of the beauty salon – hair, nails, bellies, bums and breasts become autonomous objects. Her models are often out of the ordinary, such as the formidable Queen Raqui and the statuesque erotic model Bunny Glamazon. Rottenberg is interested in the dynamic between the exhibitionist and the voyeur. Her art works hint at power relations and reversals. A self-avowed feminist, she has said her work started with Marx.

The exhibition was initiated by De Appel, Amsterdam’s leading arts centre and travelled to M-Museum Leuven in Belgium before coming to Nottingham.