Mika Rottenberg: Bowls Balls Souls Holes opens at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University on Friday, February 14. Featuring video installation artist Mika Rottenberg’s humorous, surreal and politically incisive work Squeeze, this exhibition provides a comprehensive account of the artist’s conceptual interests and material sensibilities to date. The recipient of this year’s Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Award, Rottenberg will create a new work, entitled Bowls Balls Souls Holes, specifically for the Rose exhibition.

On view through June 8, the exhibition is free and open to the public. An opening reception, featuring a conversation between Rottenberg and Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Christopher Bedford at 6:30 pm, will be held on Thursday, February 13 from 5 to 8 pm.

According to Bedford, curator of the exhibition, “Mika’s installation, which will occupy the Lois Foster Gallery, will be a major statement for her and for the Rose. Her work is simultaneously sophisticated and very, very accessible – and the way she integrates the moving image within the sculptural environment is incredible. Her exhibition will effect a radical transformation of the space through her own sculptural materials, through architecture, through sound, and through the moving image.”

Rottenberg’s immersive video installations envision the female body as a microcosm of larger societal issues of gender, class, globalization and labor. In her provocative short films, a cast of glamorous and oddly erotic workers, chosen for their unique features and talents, engage in outrageous narratives in factory-like settings while exploring means of manufacture and production. The New York Times’ Roberta Smith has said of her work, “Rottenberg makes videos that involve women performing mysterious, product-oriented rituals in close quarters, usually with hilarious feminist overtones and not a little body heat.”

Mika Rottenberg: Bowls Balls Souls Holes will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue that will be published in May 2014, featuring essays by Christopher Bedford, Julia Bryan Wilson, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

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). Solo exhibitions include De Appel Amsterdam, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; La Maison Rouge, Paris; Magazine 3, Stockholm, Sweden; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; 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, Berlin and New York); The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Uncertain States of America: American Art in the Third Millennium (multiple venues, 2005–2006). She lives and works in New York. To view the PBS series, Art21, feature on Rottenberg, visit https://vimeo.com/58723358.

Founded in 1961, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is an educational and cultural institution dedicated to collecting, preserving and exhibiting the finest of modern and contemporary art. The programs of the Rose adhere to the overall mission of the university, embracing its values of academic excellence, social justice and freedom of expression. The museum’s permanent collection of postwar and contemporary art is unequalled in New England and is among the best at any university art museum in the United States.