What is recycling good for, asks Mika Rottenberg at Hauser & Wirth Menorca

‘Recycling is a failed system,’ declares Argentina-born, US-based artist Mika Rottenberg from her studio in upstate New York. ‘Nothing really gets recycled, even in New York City, it's a complete disaster.’ This damning verdict underpins Rottenberg’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, ‘Vibrant Matter’, a direct response to the broken promises of a future that never arrived.

Across two films, drawings and a new series of sculptures, Rottenberg’s exhibition instead ponders what might have been. With an emphasis on the haptic and fluid, Rottenberg toys with the transformation of matter into other states, a reminder, in other words, of everything recycling promised. Yet for all the exhibition’s critique, Rottenberg is eager to make clear that ‘this is not a solution, this is just, what do you do with so much trash?’ Her response? ‘You can do something pretty with it.’

For her new Lampshares (2025), Rottenberg has created brightly coloured luminescent fungi that erupt from walls, ceilings and plinths, or simply lie on the exhibition floor like gnarled reclining figures. Beyond their Grimm fairytale looks, these sculptures embody her interest in alchemical transformation. Combining bittersweet vines, an invasive species that chokes the forests surrounding Rottenberg’s studio, with waste plastic that is collected from the Bronx and East Harlem before being melted and remoulded, these psychedelic, eerily anthropomorphic lamps turn toxicity into an opportunity for reinvention.

Straddling natural and artificial, functional and decorative, grotesque and beautiful, they represent the healing and redemptive qualities of Rottenberg's studio in preparation for this exhibition, where damage is, quite literally, metabolised into illumination.

Shown alongside her two films, Cosmic Generator (2017-18) and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), the Lampshares echo the same fundamental concern with material transformation and systems of production and consumption. Speaking on their joint presentation for this exhibition, Rottenberg points out that ‘video is light and plastic is fossil fuel, which is ancient light trapped in oil, but it could not get back to the earth and complete the cycle. So making it into a lamp is a way to metaphorically release the light.’

In Spaghetti Blockchain, a three-channel montage exploring how humans process and interact with matter – from potatoes being harvested to antimatter research at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) – Rottenberg frames these disparate acts as part of a surreal production chain. Like the oddly seductive yet grotesque Lampshares, the film's heavy use of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) invites a playful and visceral engagement while carrying the conceptual weight of ecological collapse and overconsumption.

Cosmic Generator similarly eschews clear categories, instead taking viewers on a disorientating and fantastical trip that connects footage from a plastic goods market in Yiwu, China, with the US-Mexico border, in a continuation of the artist's long-running investigation into labour, materiality and global capitalism. By collapsing distinctions between real markets and imagined portals, industrial zones and kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, documentary footage and constructed sets, the film highlights the absurdity of commodity circulation and how capitalist circuits of production and consumption intertwine in invisible and irrational ways.

The destabilising effect of both films is, for Rottenberg, an essential reflection of our times. ‘Our digital existence is very disorientating,’ she says. ‘Diving into social media, you're reading horrible news and you're being pulled into so many different places that are conflicting – so I think it’s a very current feeling.’ In Rottenberg’s art, however, we can find, if not salvation, then a certain respite, an assurance that the chaos surrounding us is part of a timeless circularity. As she says: ‘Transformation is magic, it's like alchemy, and that's what art is about.’

Mika Rottenberg: Vibrant Matter at Hauser & Wirth Menorca until 26 October 2025, hauserwirth.com